Skip to main content

Full text of "White collar; the American middle classes"

See other formats


C  WRIGHT  MILLi 


GB3  $1.95 

In  Canada     $2.15 


% 


m 


^ 


§ 


'^ 


^ 


^lOSANCEl^r^ 


.^llIBRARYi! 


^J'ilJDNVSOl^       "^/SiaAINfl-JWV^         ^OJIIVOJO^      ^AOJIIVDJC 


c-7 

1# 


«\WEUNIVERS/A 
>- 


^lOSANCElfj^ 


^OFCAllFOff^ 


>;,OFCAllF0/i! 


<ri133NVS01^       '^AiUAIKflBv'  ^<?AHVaaill^^ 


1-3WV 


I 


A^lllBRARYO^^ 


^.MOJIIVDJO'^ 


.^lUBRARYQ^. 


so 


.5MEDNIVERy/A 
>- 


^lOSANCElf 


"^/^ilJAINrtJV 


^OFCAUFOftK^ 


^OF-CALIFOff^         ^^WE•UNIVER% 


^10SANCEI£ 

o 


"^liONvsm^ 


"^/iaiAiNn-jv 


^^\^E•UNIVER%       ^lOSANCElfj*^ 


^^•lIBRARYCJc. 


^HIBRARY< 


<fJWDNV  SOl^       %a3AINn  ]\\V^         ^^HQ]  IW3- JO"*?^ 


^^ojnvjjc 


1# 


.^WEUNIVERJ//) 


^lOSANCElfx^ 
o 


^OFCAIIFO/?^,     ^OF-CAlIFOfi 


^i:?U3NVS01^       %a3AINflBV^         "^OAaVHaiH^^ 


-^lUBRARYQc.       ^IIIBRARYO^ 


^v>«-  •"•■  ■  '-"■^'/j^       ^lOSANCElf, 


\WEUNIVER% 


m  m 


>'6mmn^ 


9.   SU' 


'^Xil33KVS01^ 


^WEUNIVERS/Zi 


A^lOSANCElEfA. 


"^AajAiNrt-awv 


AWEUNIVER%        .v'-OSANCElfx^ 


%a3AiNn3Wv 


^^^IIIBRARYQ^ 


-S: 


^^IIIBRARYQ/-^ 


^i; 


^OfCAllFOfffc       <j:OFD 


^illBRARYQ^ 


.^.OFCALIFO^ 


^.OFCAIIFC: 

V£)i 


^<?AavaaiH"^ 


?7 


L 


f-^        ■■'-? 


% 


;NV-ivOV^'^ 


o'smm-^'^'^' 


AWEI)N1VERS//> 


O 


^J'ilJDKVSOl^        "^AaaAINO^WV 


^OJIIVJ-JO"^ 


^<!/OJIlV0-JO'^ 


aWEUNIVERS/a 


^lOSANCElfx^ 

o 


jA:OF-CAlIF0%      ^.OFCAIIFO/?^ 


^TiijoNvsoi^     "^AajAiNn-iwv^        ^<?Ayvaaii-^^      ^(^AdvaaiH^"^ 


1^ 


^sS^UBRARYQ^^ 


^IUBRARYQc. 

5  1  ir"  ^ 


.^WEUNIVER^//^ 


^vKlOSANCElfj^. 


WHITE  COLLAR 

The  American  Middle  Classes 


J> 


WHITE 
COLLAR 

The  American  Middle  Classes 

by  C.  Wright  Mills 


OXFORD   UNIVERSITY   PRESS 

LONDON  OXFORD  NEW  YORK 


OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

Oxford     London     New  York 

Glasgow     Toronto     Melbourne     Wellington 

Cape  Town     Salisbury     Ibadan     Nairobi     Lusaka     Addis  Ababa 

Bombay     Calcutta     Madras     Karachi     Lahore     Dacca 

Kuala  Lumpur     Hong  Kong     Tokyo 


Copyright  1951  by  Oxford  University  Press,  Inc. 
First  published  by  Oxford  University  Press,  New  York,  1951 
First  issued  as  an  Oxford  University  Press  paperback,  1956 

This  reprint,  1969 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Ur 


Contents 

Introduction,  ix 

ONE:  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

1.  The  World  of  the  Small  Entrepreneur,  3 

1.  The  Old  Middle  Classes,  3 

2.  Property,  Freedom  and  Security,  7 

3.  The  Self-Balancing  Society,  9 

2.  The  Transformation  of  Property,  13 

1.  The  Rural  Debacle,  15 

2.  Business  Dynamics,  20 

3.  The  Lumpen-Bourgeoisie,  28 

3.  The  Rhetoric  of  Competition,  34 

1.  The  Competitive  Way  of  Life,  35 

2.  The  Independent  Farmer,  40 

3.  The  Small  Business  Front,  44 

4.  Political  Persistence,  54 

TWO:  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

4.  The  New  Middle  Class:  I,  63 

1.  Occupational  Change,  63 

2.  Industrial  Mechanics,  65 

3.  White-Collar  Pyramids,  70 

5.  The  Managerial  Demiurge,  77 

1.  The  Bureaucracies,  78 

2.  From  the  Top  to  the  Bottom,  81 

3.  The  Case  of  the  Foreman,  87 

4.  The  New  Entrepreneur,  91 

5.  The  Power  of  the  Managers,  100 

6.  Three  Trends,  106 


vi  CONTENTS 

6.  Old  Professions  and  New  Skills,  112 

1.  The  Professions  and  Bureaucracy,  113 

2.  The  Medical  World,  115 

3.  Lawyers,  121 

4.  The  Professors,  129 

5.  Business  and  the  Professions,  136 

7.  Brains,  inc.,  142 

1.  Four  Phases,  144 

2.  The  Bureaucratic  Context,  149 

3.  The  Ideological  Demand,  153 

4.  The  Rise  of  the  Technician,  156 

8.  The  Great  Salesroom,  161 

1.  Types  of  Salesmen,  161 

2.  The  Biggest  Bazaar  in  the  World,  166 

3.  Buyers  and  Floorwalkers,  169 

4.  The  Salesgirls,  172 

5.  The  Centralization  of  Salesmanship,  178 

6.  The  Personality  Market,  182 

9.  The  Enormous  File,  189 

1.  The  Old  Office,  190 

2.  Forces  and  Developments,  192 

3.  The  White-Collar  Girl,  198 

4.  The  New  Office,  204 

5.  The  White-Collar  Hierarchy,  209 

THREE:  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

10.  Work,  215 

1.  Meanings  of  Work,  215 

2.  The  Ideal  of  Craftsmanship,  220 

3.  The  Conditions  of  Modern  Work,  224 

4.  Frames  of  Acceptance,  229 

5.  The  Morale  of  the  Cheerful  Robots,  233 

6.  The  Big  Split,  235 

11.  The  Status  Panic,  239 

1.  White-Collar  Prestige,  240 

2.  The  Smaller  City,  250 

3.  The  Metropolis,  251 

4.  The  Status  Panic,  254 


CONTENTS 

12.  Success,  259 

1.  Patterns  and  Ideologies,  259 

2.  The  Educational  Elevator,  265 

3.  Origins  and  Mobilities,  272 

4.  Hard  Times,  278 

5.  The  Tarnished  Image,  282 


FOUR:  WAYS  OF  POWER 


13.  The  New  Middle  Class:  II,  289 

1.  Theories  and  Difficulties,  290 

2.  Mentahties,  294 

3.  Organizations,  298 

14.  White-Collar  Unionism,  301 

1.  The  Extent  Organized,  302 

2.  Acceptance  and  Rejection,  304 

3.  Individual  Involvement,  308 

4.  The  Shape  of  Unionism,  314 

5.  Unions  and  Politics,  320 

15.  The  Politics  of  the  Rearguard,  324 

1.  Models  of  Consciousness,  324 

2.  Political  Indifference,  327 

3.  The  Mass  Media,  332 

4.  The  Social  Structure,  340 

5.  U.S.  Politics,  342 

6.  The  Rearguarders,  350 

Acknowledgments  and  Sources,  355 
Index,  365 


No  one  could  suspect  that  times 
were  coming  .  .  .  when  the  man  who 
chd  not  gamble  would  lose  all  the 
time,  even  more  surely  than  he  who 
gambled.' 

CHARLES  PEGUY 


Introduction 


I  HE  white-collar  people  slipped  quietly  into  modern  society. 
Whatever  history  they  have  had  is  a  history  without  events;  what- 
ever common  interests  they  have  do  not  lead  to  unity;  what- 
ever future  they  have  will  not  be  of  their  own  making.  If  they 
aspire  at  all  it  is  to  a  middle  course,  at  a  time  when  no  middle 
course  is  available,  and  hence  to  an  illusory  course  in  an  imagi- 
nary society.  Internally,  they  are  split,  fragmented;  externally, 
they  are  dependent  on  larger  forces.  Even  if  they  gained  the 
will  to  act,  their  actions,  being  unorganized,  would  be  less  a 
movement  than  a  tangle  of  unconnected  contests.  As  a  group, 
they  do  not  threaten  anyone;  as  individuals,  they  do  not  practice 
an  independent  way  of  life.  So  before  an  adequate  idea  of  them 
could  be  formed,  they  have  been  taken  for  granted  as  familiar 
actors  of  the  urban  mass. 

Yet  it  is  to  this  white-collar  world  that  one  must  look  for  much 
that  is  characteristic  of  twentieth-century  existence.  By  their  rise 
to  numerical  importance,  the  white-collar  people  have  upset  the 
nineteenth-century  expectation  that  society  would  be  divided 
between  entrepreneurs  and  wage  workers.  By  their  mass  way  of 
life,  they  have  transformed  the  tang  and  feel  of  the  American 
experience.  They  carry,  in  a  most  revealing  way,  many  of  those 
psychological  themes  that  characterize  our  epoch,  and,  in  one 
way  or  another,  every  general  theory  of  the  main  drift  has  had 
to  take  account  of  them.  For  above  all  else  they  are  a  new 
cast  of  actors,  performing  the  major  routines  of  twentieth-cen- 
tury society: 

At  the  top  of  the  white-collar  world,  the  old  captain  of  industry 


X  INTRODUCTION 

hands  over  his  tasks  to  the  manager  of  the  corporation.  Alongside 
the  poHtician,  with  his  string  tie  and  ready  tongue,  the  salaried 
bureaucrat,  with  brief  case  and  slide  rule,  rises  into  political 
view.  These  top  managers  now  command  hierarchies  of  anony- 
mous middle  managers,  floorwalkers,  salaried  foremen,  county 
agents,  federal  inspectors,  and  police  investigators  trained  in  the 
law. 

In  the  established  professions,  the  doctor,  lawyer,  engineer, 
once  was  free  and  named  on  his  own  shingle;  in  the  new  white- 
collar  world,  the  salaried  specialists  of  the  clinic,  the  junior  part- 
ners in  the  law  factory,  the  captive  engineers  of  the  corporation 
have  begun  to  challenge  free  professional  leadership.  The  old 
professions  of  medicine  and  law  are  still  at  the  top  of  the  profes- 
sional world,  but  now  all  around  them  are  men  and  women 
of  new  skills.  There  are  a  dozen  kinds  of  social  engineers  and 
mechanical  technicians,  a  multitude  of  girl  Fridays,  laboratory 
assistants,  registered  and  unregistered  nurses,  draftsmen,  statis- 
ticians, social  workers. 

In  the  salesrooms,  which  sometimes  seem  to  coincide  with  the 
new  society  as  a  whole,  are  the  stationary  salesgirls  in  the  de- 
partment store,  the  mobile  salesmen  of  insurance,  the  absentee 
salesmen— ad-men  helping  others  sell  from  a  distance.  At  the  top 
are  the  prima  donnas,  the  vice  presidents  who  say  that  they  are 
'merely  salesmen,  although  perhaps  a  little  more  creative  than 
others,'  and  at  the  bottom,  the  five-and-dime  clerks,  selling  com- 
modities at  a  fixed  price,  hoping  soon  to  leave  the  job  for  mar- 
riage. 

In  the  enormous  file  of  the  oflBce,  in  all  the  calculating  rooms, 
accountants  and  purchasing  agents  replace  the  man  who  did  his 
own  figuring.  And  in  the  lower  reaches  of  the  white-collar  world, 
ofiice  operatives  grind  along,  loading  and  emptying  the  filing 
system;  there  are  private  secretaries  and  typists,  entry  clerks, 
billing  clerks,  corresponding  clerks— a  thousand  kinds  of  clerks; 
the  operators  of  light  machinery,  comptometers,  dictaphones, 
addressographs;  and  the  receptionists  to  let  you  in  or  keep  you 
out. 

Images  of  white-collar  types  are  now  part  of  the  literature 
of  every  major  industrial  nation:   Hans  Fallada  presented  the 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

Pinnebergs  to  pre-Hitler  Germany.  Johannes  Pinneberg,  a  book- 
keeper trapped  by  inflation,  depression,  and  wife  with  child, 
ends  up  in  the  economic  gutter,  with  no  answer  to  the  question, 
'Little  Man,  What  Now?'— except  support  by  a  genuinely  prole- 
tarian wife.  J.  B.  Priestley  created  a  gallery  of  tortured  and  in- 
secure creatures  from  the  white-collar  world  of  London  in  Angel 
Pavement.  Here  are  people  who  have  been  stood  up  by  life: 
what  they  most  desire  is  forbidden  them  by  reason  of  what  they 
are.  George  Orwell's  Mr.  Bowling,  a  salesman  in  Coming  Up 
for  Air,  speaks  for  them  all,  perhaps,  when  he  says:  'There's  a 
lot  of  rot  talked  about  the  sufferings  of  the  working  class.  I'm 
not  so  sorry  for  the  proles  myself.  .  .  The  prole  suffers  physically, 
but  he's  a  free  man  when  he  isn't  working.  But  in  every  one  of 
those  little  stucco  boxes  there's  some  poor  bastard  who's  never 
free  except  when  he's  fast  asleep  and  dreaming  that  he's  got  the 
boss  down  the  bottom  of  a  well  and  is  bunging  lumps  of  coal 
at  him.  Of  course  the  basic  trouble  with  people  like  us  is  that  we 
all  imagine  we've  got  something  to  lose.' 

Kitty  Foyle  is  perhaps  the  closest  American  counterpart  of 
these  European  novels.  But  how  different  its  heroine  is!  In  Amer- 
ica, unlike  Europe,  the  fate  of  white-collar  types  is  not  yet  clear. 
A  modernized  Horatio  Alger  heroine,  Kitty  Foyle  (like  Alice 
Adams  before  her)  has  aspirations  up  the  Main  Line.  The  book 
ends,  in  a  depression  year,  with  Kitty  earning  $3000  a  year, 
about  to  buy  stock  in  her  firm,  and  hesitating  over  marrying  a 
doctor  who  happens  to  be  a  Jew.  While  Herr  Pinneberg  in  Ger- 
many was  finding  out,  too  late,  that  his  proletarian  wife  was  at 
once  his  life  fate  and  his  political  chance,  Kitty  Foyle  was  busy 
pursuing  an  American  career  in  the  cosmetics  business.  But 
twenty-five  years  later,  during  the  American  postwar  boom  Willy 
Loman  appears,  the  hero  of  The  Death  of  a  Salesman,  the  white- 
collar  man  who  by  the  very  virtue  of  his  moderate  success  in 
business  turns  out  to  be  a  total  failure  in  life.  Frederic  Wertham 
has  written  of  Willy  Loman's  dream:  'He  succeeds  with  it;  he 
fails  with  it;  he  dies  with  it.  But  why  did  he  have  this  dream? 
Isn't  it  true  that  he  had  to  have  a  false  dream  in  our  society?' 

The  nineteenth-century  farmer  and  businessman  were  gen- 
erally thought  to  be  stalwart  individuals— their  own  men,  men 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

who  could  quickly  grow  to  be  almost  as  big  as  anyone  else.  The 
twentieth-century  white-collar  man  has  never  been  independent 
as  the  farmer  used  to  be,  nor  as  hopeful  of  the  main  chance  as 
the  businessman.  He  is  always  somebody's  man,  the  corpora- 
tion's, the  government's,  the  army's;  and  he  is  seen  as  the  man 
who  does  not  rise.  The  decline  of  the  free  entrepreneur  and  the 
rise  of  the  dependent  employee  on  the  American  scene  has  paral- 
leled the  decline  of  the  independent  individual  and  the  rise  of 
the  little  man  in  the  American  mind. 

In  a  world  crowded  with  big  ugly  forces,  the  white-collar  man 
is  readily  assumed  to  possess  all  the  supposed  virtues  of  the  small 
creature.  He  may  be  at  the  bottom  of  the  social  world,  but  he  is, 
at  the  same  time,  gratifyingly  middle  class.  It  is  easy  as  well  as 
safe  to  sympathize  with  his  troubles;  he  can  do  little  or  noth- 
ing about  them.  Other  social  actors  threaten  to  become  big  and 
aggressive,  to  act  out  of  selfish  interests  and  deal  in  politics.  The 
big  businessman  continues  his  big-business-as-usual  through 
the  normal  rhythm  of  slump  and  war  and  boom;  the  big  labor 
man,  lifting  his  shaggy  eyebrows,  holds  up  the  nation  until  his 
demands  are  met;  the  big  farmer  cultivates  the  Senate  to  see  that 
big  farmers  get  theirs.  But  not  the  white-collar  man.  He  is  more 
often  pitiful  than  tragic,  as  he  is  seen  collectively,  fighting  im- 
personal inflation,  living  out  in  slow  misery  his  yearning  for  the 
quick  American  climb.  He  is  pushed  by  forces  beyond  his  con- 
trol, pulled  into  movements  he  does  not  understand;  he  gets  into 
situations  in  which  his  is  the  most  helpless  position.  The  white- 
collar  man  is  the  hero  as  victim,  the  small  creature  who  is  acted 
upon  but  who  does  not  act,  who  works  along  unnoticed  in  some- 
body's office  or  store,  never  talking  loud,  never  talking  back, 
never  taking  a  stand. 

When  the  focus  shifts  from  the  generalized  Little  Man  to  spe- 
cific white-collar  types  whom  the  public  encounters,  the  images 
become  diverse  and  often  unsympathetic.  Sympathy  itself  often 
carries  a  sharp  patronizing  edge;  the  word  'clerk,'  for  example, 
is  likely  to  be  preceded  by  'merely.'  Who  talks  willingly  to  the 
insurance  agent,  opens  the  door  to  the  bill  collector?  'Everybody 
knows  how  rude  and  nasty  salesgirls  can  be.'  Schoolteachers  ara 
standard  subjects  for  businessmen's  jokes.  The  housewife's  opin 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

ion  of  private  secretaries  is  not  often  friendly— indeed,  much  of 
white-collar  fiction  capitalizes  on  her  hostility  to  'the  office  wife.' 
These  are  images  of  specific  white-collar  types  seen  from 
above.  But  from  below,  for  two  generations  sons  and  daughters 
of  the  poor  have  looked  forward  eagerly  to  becoming  even  'mere' 
clerks.  Parents  have  sacrificed  to  have  even  one  child  finish  high 
school,  business  school,  or  college  so  that  he  could  be  the  assist- 
ant to  the  executive,  do  the  filing,  type  the  letter,  teach  school, 
work  in  the  government  office,  do  something  requiring  technical 
skills:  hold  a  white-collar  job.  In  serious  literature  white-collar 
images  are  often  subjects  for  lamentation;  in  popular  writing 
they  are  often  targets  of  aspiration. 

Images  of  American  types  have  not  been  built  carefully  by 
piecing  together  live  experience.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  they  have 
been  made  up  out  of  tradition  and  schoolbook  and  the  early, 
easy  drift  of  the  unalerted  mind.  And  they  have  been  reinforced 
and  even  created,  especially  in  white-collar  times,  by  the  editorial 
machinery  of  popular  amusement  and  mass  communications. 

Manipulations  by  professional  image-makers  are  efi^ective  be- 
cause their  audiences  do  not  or  cannot  know  personally  all  the 
people  they  want  to  talk  about  or  be  like,  and  because  they  have 
an  unconscious  need  to  believe  in  certain  types.  In  their  need 
and  inexperience,  such  audiences  snatch  and  hold  to  the  glimpses 
of  types  that  are  frozen  into  the  language  with  which  they  see 
the  world.  Even  when  they  meet  the  people  behind  the  types 
face  to  face,  previous  images,  linked  deeply  with  feeling,  blind 
them  to  what  stands  before  them.  Experience  is  trapped  by 
false  images,  even  as  reality  itself  sometimes  seems  to  imitate  the 
soap  opera  and  the  publicity  release. 

Perhaps  the  most  cherished  national  images  are  sentimental 
versions  of  historical  types  that  no  longer  exist,  if  indeed  they 
ever  did.  Underpinning  many  standard  images  of  The  American 
is  the  myth,  in  the  words  of  the  eminent  historian,  A.  M.  Schles- 
inger,  Sr.,  of  the  'long  tutelage  to  the  soil'  which,  as  'the  chief 
formative  influence,'  results  in  'courage,  creative  energy  and  re- 
sourcefulness. .  .'  According  to  this  idea,  which  clearly  bears  a 
nineteenth-century  trademark.  The  American  possesses  magical 
independence,  homely  ingenuity,  great  capacity  for  work,  all  of 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

which  virtues  he  attained  while  strugghng  to  subdue  the  vast 
continent. 

One  hundred  years  ago,  when  three-fourths  of  the  people  were 
farmers,  there  may  have  been  some  justification  for  engraving 
such  an  image  and  calling  it  The  American.  But  since  then,  farm- 
ers have  declined  to  scarcely  more  than  one-tenth  of  the  occu- 
pied populace,  and  new  classes  of  salaried  employees  and  wage- 
workers  have  risen.  Deep-going  historic  changes  resulting  in 
wide  diversities  have  long  challenged  the  nationalistic  historian 
who  would  cling  to  The  American  as  a  single  type  of  ingenious 
farmer-artisan.  In  so  far  as  universals  can  be  found  in  life  and 
character  in  America,  they  are  due  less  to  any  common  tutelage 
of  the  soil  than  to  the  leveling  influences  of  urban  civilization, 
and  above  all,  to  the  standardization  of  the  big  technology  and 
of  the  media  of  mass  communication. 

America  is  neither  the  nation  of  horse-traders  and  master 
builders  of  economic  theory,  nor  the  nation  of  go-getting,  claim- 
jumping,  cattle-rustling  pioneers  of  frontier  mythology.  Nor  have 
the  traits  rightly  or  wrongly  associated  with  such  historic  types 
carried  over  into  the  contemporary  population  to  any  noticeable 
degree.  Only  a  fraction  of  this  population  consists  of  free  private 
enterprisers  in  any  economic  sense;  there  are  now  four  times  as 
many  wage-workers  and  salary  workers  as  independent  entre- 
preneurs. 'The  struggle  for  life,'  William  Dean  Howells  wrote  in 
the  'nineties,  'has  changed  from  a  free  fight  to  an  encounter  of 
disciplined  forces,  and  the  free  fighters  that  are  left  get  ground 
to  pieces.  .  .' 

If  it  is  assumed  that  white-collar  employees  represent  some 
sort  of  continuity  with  the  old  middle  class  of  entrepreneurs, 
then  it  may  be  said  that  for  the  last  hundred  years  the  middle 
classes  have  been  facing  the  slow  expropriation  of  their  holdings, 
and  that  for  the  last  twenty  years  they  have  faced  the  spectre 
of  unemployment.  Both  assertions  rest  on  facts,  but  the  facts  have 
not  been  experienced  by  the  middle  class  as  a  double  crisis.  The 
property  question  is  not  an  issue  to  the  new  middle  class  of  the 
present  generation.  That  was  fought  out,  and  lost,  before  World 
War  I,  by  the  old  middle  class.  The  centralization  of  small  prop- 
erties is  a  development  that  has  afi^ected  each  generation  back  to 
our  great-grandfathers,  reaching  its  climax  in  the  Progressive  Era. 


rNTRODUCTION  xv 

It  has  been  a  secular  trend  of  too  slow  a  tempo  to  be  felt  as  a 
continuing  crisis  by  middle-class  men  and  women,  who  often 
seem  to  have  become  more  commodity-minded  than  property- 
minded.  Yet  history  is  not  always  enacted  consciously;  if  expro- 
priation is  not  felt  as  crisis,  still  it  is  a  basic  fact  in  the  ways  of 
life  and  the  aspirations  of  the  new  middle  class;  and  the  facts  of 
unemployment  are  felt  as  fears,  hanging  over  the  white-collar 
world. 

By  examining  white-collar  life,  it  is  possible  to  learn  something 
about  what  is  becoming  more  typically  'American'  than  the  fron- 
tier character  probably  ever  was.  What  must  be  grasped  is  the 
picture  of  society  as  a  great  salesroom,  an  enormous  file,  an  in- 
corporated brain,  a  new  universe  of  management  and  manipula- 
tion. By  understanding  these  diverse  white-collar  worlds,  one 
can  also  understand  better  the  shape  and  meaning  of  modem 
society  as  a  whole,  as  well  as  the  simple  hopes  and  complex 
anxieties  that  grip  all  the  people  who  are  sweating  it  out  in  the 
middle  of  the  twentieth  century. 

The  troubles  that  confront  the  white-collar  people  are  the 
troubles  of  all  men  and  women  living  in  the  twentieth  century. 
If  these  troubles  seem  particularly  bitter  to  the  new  middle  strata, 
perhaps  that  is  because  for  a  brief  time  these  people  felt  them- 
selves immune  to  troubles. 

Before  the  First  World  War  there  were  fewer  little  men,  and 
in  their  brief  monopoly  of  high-school  education  they  were  in 
fact  protected  from  many  of  the  sharper  edges  of  the  workings 
of  capitalist  progress.  They  were  free  to  entertain  deep  illusions 
about  their  individual  abilities  and  about  the  collective  trust- 
worthiness of  the  system.  As  their  number  has  grown,  however, 
they  have  become  increasingly  subject  to  wage-worker  condi- 
tions. Especially  since  the  Great  Depression  have  white-collar 
people  come  up  against  all  the  old  problems  of  capitalist  society. 
They  have  been  racked  by  slump  and  war  and  even  by  boom. 
They  have  learned  about  impersonal  unemployment  in  depres- 
sions and  about  impersonal  death  by  technological  violence  in 
war.  And  in  good  times,  as  prices  rose  faster  than  salaries,  the 
money  they  thought  they  were  making  was  silently  taken  away 
from  them. 


xvi  INTRODUCTION 

The  material  hardship  of  nineteenth-century  industrial  workers 
finds  its  parallel  on  the  psychological  level  among  twentieth- 
century  white-collar  employees.  The  new  Little  Man  seems^  to 
have  no  firm  roots,  no  sure  loyalties  to  sustain  his  life  and  give  it 
a  center.  He  is  not  aware  of  having  any  history,  his  past  being 
as  brief  as  it  is  unheroic;  he  has  lived  through  no  golden  age  he 
can  recall  in  time  of  trouble.  Perhaps  because  he  does  not  know 
where  he  is  going,  he  is  in  a  frantic  hurry;  perhaps  because  he 
does  not  know  what  frightens  him,  he  is  paralyzed  with  fear. 
This  is  especially  a  feature  of  his  political  life,  where  the  paralysis 
results  in  the  most  profound  apathy  of  modern  times. 

The  uneasiness,  the  malaise  of  our  time,  is  due  to  this  root  fact: 
in  our  politics  and  economy,  in  family  life  and  religion— in  prac- 
tically every  sphere  of  our  existence— the  certainties  of  the  eight- 
eenth and  nineteenth  centuries  have  disintegrated  or  been  de- 
stroyed and,  at  the  same  time,  no  new  sanctions  or  justifications 
for  the  new  routines  we  live,  and  must  live,  have  taken  hold.  So 
there  is  no  acceptance  and  there  is  no  rejection,  no  sweeping 
hope  and  no  sweeping  rebellion.  There  is  no  plan  of  life.  Among 
white-collar  people,  the  malaise  is  deep-rooted;  for  the  absence 
of  any  order  of  belief  has  left  them  morally  defenseless  as  indi- 
viduals and  politically  impotent  as  a  group.  Newly  created  in 
a  harsh  time  of  creation,  white-collar  man  has  no  culture  to  lean 
upon  except  the  contents  of  a  mass  society  that  has  shaped  him 
and  seeks  to  manipulate  him  to  its  alien  ends.  For  security's 
sake,  he  must  strain  to  attach  himself  somewhere,  but  no  com- 
munities or  organizations  seem  to  be  thoroughly  his.  This  iso- 
lated position  makes  him  excellent  material  for  synthetic  mold- 
ing at  the  hands  of  popular  culture— print,  film,  radio,  and  tele- 
vision. As  a  metropolitan  dweller,  he  is  especially  open  to  the 
focused  onslaught  of  all  the  manufactured  loyalties  and  dis- 
tractions that  are  contrived  and  urgently  pressed  upon  those 
who  live  in  worlds  they  never  made. 

In  the  case  of  the  white-collar  man,  the  alienation  of  the  wage- 
worker  from  the  products  of  his  work  is  carried  one  step  nearer 
to  its  Kafka-like  completion.  The  salaried  employee  does  not 
make  anything,  although  he  may  handle  much  that  he  greatly 
desires  but  cannot  have.  No  product  of  craftsmanship  can  be  his 
to  contemplate  with  pleasure  as  it  is  being  created  and  after  it 


INTRODUCTION  xvii 

is  made.  Being  alienated  from  any  product  of  his  labor,  and 
going  year  after  year  through  the  same  paper  routine,  he  turns 
his  leisure  all  the  more  frenziedly  to  the  ersatz  diversion  that  is 
sold  him,  and  partakes  of  the  synthetic  excitement  that  neither 
eases  nor  releases.  He  is  bored  at  work  and  restless  at  play,  and 
this  terrible  alternation  wears  him  out. 

In  his  work  he  often  clashes  with  customer  and  superior,  and 
must  almost  always  be  the  standardized  loser:  he  must  smile 
and  be  personable,  standing  behind  the  counter,  or  waiting  in 
the  outer  oflBce.  In  many  strata  of  white-collar  employment,  such 
traits  as  courtesy,  helpfulness,  and  kindness,  once  intimate,  are 
now  part  of  the  impersonal  means  of  livelihood.  Self-ahenation 
is  thus  an  accompaniment  of  his  alienated  labor. 

When  white-collar  pepple  get  jobs,  they  sell  not  only  their  time 
and  energy  but  their  personalities  as  well.  They  sell  by  the  week 
or  month  their  smiles  and  their  kindly  gestures,  and  they  must 
practice  the  prompt  repression  of  resentment  and  aggression.  For 
these  intimate  traits  are  of  commercial  relevance  and  required 
for  the  more  eflBcient  and  profitable  distribution  of  goods  and 
services.  Here  are  the  new  little  Machiavellians,  practicing  their 
personable  crafts  for  hire  and  for  the  profit  of  others,  according 
to  rules  laid  down  by  those  above  them. 

In  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries,  rationahty  was 
identified  with  freedom.  The  ideas  of  Freud  about  the  individual, 
and  of  Marx  about  society,  were  strengthened  by  the  assumption 
of  the  coincidence  of  freedom  and  rationality.  Now  rationality 
seems  to  have  taken  on  a  new  form,  to  have  its  seat  not  in  indi- 
vidual men,  but  in  social  institutions  which  by  their  bureaucratic 
planning  and  mathematical  foresight  usurp  both  freedom  and 
rationality  from  the  little  individual  men  caught  in  them.  The 
calculating  hierarchies  of  department  store  and  industrial  cor- 
poration, of  rationalized  office  and  governmental  bureau,  lay  out 
the  gray  ways  of  work  and  stereotype  the  permitted  initiatives. 
And  in  all  this  bureaucratic  usurpation  of  freedom  and  of  ration- 
ahty, the  white-collar  people  are  the  interchangeable  parts  of  the 
big  chains  of  authority  that  bind  the  society  together. 

White-collar  people,  always  visible  but  rarely  seen,  are  politi- 
cally voiceless.  Stray  politicians  wandering  in  the  political  arena 
without  party  may  put  'white  collar'  people  alongside  business- 


xvJIf  INTRODUCTION 

men,  farmers,  and  wage-workers  in  their  broadside  appeals,  but 
no  platform  of  either  major  party  has  yet  referred  to  them  di- 
rectly. Who  fears  the  clerk?  Neither  Alice  Adams  nor  Kitty  Foyle 
could  be  a  Grapes  of  Wrath  for  the  'share-croppers  in  the  dust 
bowl  of  business.' 

But  while  practical  politicians,  still  living  in  the  ideological  air 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  have  paid  little  attention  to  the  new 
middle  class,  theoreticians  of  the  left  have  vigorously  claimed  the 
salaried  employee  as  a  potential  proletarian,  and  theoreticians  of 
the  right  and  center  have  hailed  him  as  a  sign  of  the  continuing 
bulk  and  vigor  of  the  middle  class.  Stray  heretics  from  both 
camps  have  even  thought,  from  time  to  time,  that  the  higher-ups 
of  the  white-collar  world  might  form  a  center  of  initiative  for 
new  political  beginnings.  In  Germany,  the  'black-coated  worker' 
was  one  of  the  harps  that  Hitler  played  on  his  way  to  power. 
In  England,  the  party  of  labor  is  thought  to  have  won  electoral 
socialism  by  capturing  the  votes  of  the  suburban  salaried  workers. 

To  the  question,  what  political  direction  will  the  white-collar 
people  take,  there  are  as  many  answers  as  there  are  theorists.  Yet 
to  the  observer  of  American  materials,  the  political  problem 
posed  by  these  people  is  not  so  much  what  the  direction  may  be 
as  whether  they  will  take  any  political  direction  at  all. 

Between  the  little  man's  consciousness  and  the  issues  of  our 
epoch  there  seems  to  be  a  veil  of  indifference.  His  will  seems 
numbed,  his  spirit  meager.  Other  men  of  other  strata  are  also 
politically  indifferent,  but  electoral  victories  are  imputed  to  them; 
they  do  have  tireless  pressure  groups  and  excited  captains  who 
work  in  and  around  the  hubs  of  power,  to  whom,  it  may  be  imag- 
ined, they  have  delegated  their  enthusiasm  for  public  affairs.  But 
white-collar  people  are  scattered  along  the  rims  of  all  the  wheels 
of  power:  no  one  is  enthusiastic  about  them  and,  like  political 
eunuchs,  they  themselves  are  without  potency  and  without  en- 
thusiasm for  the  lu-gent  political  clash. 

Estranged  from  community  and  society  in  a  context  of  distrust 
and  manipulation;  alienated  from  work  and,  on  the  personality 
market,  from  self;  expropriated  of  individual  rationality,  and 
politically  apathetic— these  are  the  new  little  people,  the  unwill- 
ing vanguard  of  modern  society.  These  are  some  of  the  circum- 


INTRODUCTION  xix 

stances  for  the  acceptance  of  which  their  hopeful  training  has 
quite  unprepared  them. 

What  men  are  interested  in  is  not  always  what  is  to  their  in- 
terest; the  troubles  they  are  aware  of  are  not  always  the  ones 
that  beset  them.  It  would  indeed  be  a  fetish  of  'democracy'  to 
assume  that  men  immediately  know  their  interests  and  are  clearly 
aware  of  the  conditions  within  themselves  and  their  society  that 
frustrate  them  and  make  their  efforts  misfire.  For  interests  in- 
volve not  only  values  felt,  but  also  something  of  the  means  by 
which  these  values  might  be  attained.  Merely  by  looking  into 
himself,  an  individual  can  neither  clarify  his  values  nor  set  up 
ways  for  their  attainment.  Increased  awareness  is  not  enough, 
for  it  is  not  only  that  men  can  be  unconscious  of  their  situations; 
they  are  often  falsely  conscious  of  them.  To  become  more  truly 
conscious,  white-collar  people  would  have  to  become  aware  of 
themselves  as  members  of  new  strata  practicing  new  modes  of 
work  and  life  in  modern  America.  To  know  what  it  is  possible 
to  know  about  their  troubles,  they  would  have  to  connect,  within 
the  going  framework,  what  they  are  interested  in  with  what  is  to 
their  interest. 

If  only  because  of  its  growing  numbers,  the  new  middle  class 
represents  a  considerable  social  and  political  potential,  yet  there 
is  more  systematic  information  available  on  the  farmer,  the  wage- 
worker,  the  Negro,  even  on  the  criminal,  than  on  the  men  and 
women  of  the  variegated  white-collar  worlds.  Even  the  United 
States  census  is  now  so  arranged  as  to  make  very  difficult  a  defini- 
tive count  of  these  people.  Meanwhile,  theorizing  about  the 
middle  class  on  the  basis  of  old  facts  has  run  to  seed,  and  no 
fresh  plots  of  fact  have  been  planted.  Yet  the  human  and  politi- 
cal importance  of  the  white-collar  people  continues  to  loom 
larger  and  larger. 

Liberalism's  ideal  was  set  forth  for  the  domain  of  small  prop- 
erty; Marxism's  projection,  for  that  of  unalienated  labor.  Now 
when  labor  is  everywhere  alienated  and  small  property  no  longer 
an  anchor  of  freedom  or  security,  both  these  philosophies  can 
characterize  modern  society  only  negatively;  neither  can  articu- 
late new  developments  in  their  own  terms.  We  must  accuse  both 
John  Stuart  Mill  and  Karl  Marx  of  having  done  their  work  a 


XX  INTRODUCTION 

hundred  years  ago.  What  has  happened  since  then  cannot  be 
adequately  described  as  the  destruction  of  the  nineteenth-century 
world;  by  now,  the  outlines  of  a  new  society  have  arisen  around 
us,  a  society  anchored  in  institutions  the  nineteenth  century  did 
not  know.  The  general  idea  of  the  new  middle  class,  in  all  its 
vagueness  but  also  in  all  its  ramifications,  is  an  attempt  to  grasp 
these  new  developments  of  social  structure  and  human  character. 

In  terms  of  social  philosophy,  this  book  is  written  on  the  as- 
sumption that  the  liberal  ethos,  as  developed  in  the  first  two  dec- 
ades of  this  century  by  such  men  as  Beard,  Dewey,  Holmes,  is 
now  often  irrelevant,  and  that  the  Marxian  view,  popular  in  the 
American  'thirties,  is  now  often  inadequate.  However  important 
and  suggestive  they  may  be  as  beginning  points,  and  both  are 
that,  they  do  not  enable  us  to  understand  what  is  essential  to 
our  time. 

We  need  to  characterize  American  society  of  the  mid-twentieth 
century  in  more  psychological  terms,  for  now  the  problems  that 
concern  us  most  border  on  the  psychiatric.  It  is  one  great 
task  of  social  studies  today  to  describe  the  larger  economic  and 
political  situation  in  terms  of  its  meaning  for  the  inner  life  and 
the  external  career  of  the  individual,  and  in  doing  this  to  take 
into  account  how  the  individual  often  becomes  falsely  conscious 
and  blinded.  In  the  welter  of  the  individual's  daily  experience 
the  framework  of  modern  society  must  be  sought;  within  that 
framework  the  psychology  of  the  little  man  must  be  formulated. 

The  first  lesson  of  modern  sociology  is  that  the  individual  can- 
not understand  his  own  experience  or  gauge  his  own  fate  without 
locating  himself  within  the  trends  of  his  epoch  and  the  hfe- 
chances  of  all  the  individuals  of  his  social  layer.  To  understand 
the  white-collar  people  in  detail,  it  is  necessary  to  draw  at  least 
a  rough  sketch  of  the  social  structure  of  which  they  are  a  part. 
For  the  character  of  any  stratum  consists  in  large  part  of  its  rela- 
tions, or  lack  of  them,  with  the  strata  above  and  below  it;  its 
peculiarities  can  best  be  defined  by  noting  its  differences  from 
other  strata.  The  situation  of  the  new  middle  class,  reflecting  con- 
ditions and  styles  of  life  that  are  borne  by  elements  of  both  the 
new  lower  and  the  new  upper  classes,  may  be  seen  as  symptom 
and  symbol  of  modern  society  as  a  whole. 


ONE 

Old  Middle  Classes 


'Whatever  the  future  may  contain,  the 
past  has  shown  no  more  excellent  social 
order  than  that  in  which  the  mass  of  the 
people  were  the  masters  of  the  holdings 
which  they  plowed  and  of  the  tools  with 
which  they  worked,  and  could  boast  .  .  . 
"it  is  a  quietness  to  a  man's  mind  to  live 
upon  his  own  and  to  know  his  heir  cer- 

tarn. 

R.  H.  TAvraEY 


1 


The  World 
of  the  Small  Entrepreneur 


The  early  history  of  the  middle  classes  in  America  is  a  history 
of  how  the  small  entrepreneur,  the  free  man  of  the  old  middle 
classes,  came  into  his  time  of  daylight,  of  how  he  fought  against 
enemies  he  could  see,  and  of  the  world  he  built.  The  latter-day 
history  of  these  old  middle  classes  is,  in  large  part,  the  history 
of  how  epochal  changes  on  the  farm  and  in  the  city  have  trans- 
formed him,  and  of  how  his  world  has  been  splintered  and  re- 
fashioned into  an  alien  shape. 

The  small  entrepreneur  built  his  world  along  the  classic  lines 
of  middle-class  capitalism:  a  remarkable  society  with  a  self-bal- 
ancing principle,  requiring  little  or  no  authority  at  the  center,  but 
only  wide-flung  traditions  and  a  few  safeguards  for  property. 
Here  the  ideas  of  the  political  economist  Adam  Smith  coincided 
with  those  of  the  political  moralist  Thomas  JeiBFerson;  together 
they  form  the  ideology  of  the  naturally  harmonious  world  of  the 
small  entrepreneur. 

1.  The  Old  Middle  Classes 

Unlike  the  European,  the  American  middle  classes  enter  mod- 
ern history  as  a  big  stratum  of  small  enterprisers.  Here  the  bour- 
geoisie exists  before  and  outside  of  the  city.  In  rural  Europe, 
Max  Weber  has  written,  'the  producer  is  older  than  the  market';  a 
mass  of  peasants  occupy  the  land,  held  to  it  by  ancient  tradition, 

3 


4  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

so  firmly  that  even  the  force  of  law  during  later  periods  never 
turn  them  into  rural  entrepreneurs  in  the  American  sense.  In 
America,  the  market  is  older  than  the  rural  producer. 

The  difference  between  a  peasant  mass  and  a  scattering  of 
farmers  is  one  of  the  historic  differences  between  the  social  struc- 
tures of  Europe  and  America,  and  is  of  signal  consequence  for 
the  character  of  the  middle  classes  on  both  continents.  There  they 
begin  as  a  narrow  stratum  in  the  urban  centers;  here,  as  a  broad 
stratum  of  free  farmers.  Throughout  the  whole  of  United  States 
history,  the  farmer  is  the  numerical  ballast  of  the  independent 
middle  class. 

In  American  society  neither  peasants  nor  aristocracy  have  ever 
existed  in  the  European  sense.  The  land  was  occupied  by  men 
whose  absolute  individualism  involved  an  absence  of  traditional 
fetters,  and  who,  unhampered  by  the  heirlooms  of  feudal  Europe, 
were  ready  and  eager  to  realize  the  drive  toward  capitalism. 
They  did  not  cluster  together  in  villages  but  scattered  into  an 
open  country.  Even  in  the  South  men  who  held  large  acreages 
were  usually  of  yeoman  stock,  and  bore  the  economic  and  politi- 
cal marks  of  rural  capitalists.  After  the  American  Revolution, 
many  big  northern  estates  were  confiscated  and  some  were  sold 
on  relatively  easy  terms  in  small  lots  to  small  farmers.  Europe's 
five-hundred-year  struggle  out  of  feudalism  has  not  absorbed  the 
energies  of  the  United  States  producer;  a  contractual  society 
began  here  almost  de  novo  as  a  capitalist  order. 

Capitalism  requires  private  owners  of  property  who  direct  eco- 
nomic activities  for  private  profit.  Toward  this  system  and  away 
from  subsistence,  the  American  farmers  traveled  by  way  of  new 
transport  systems  on  coastal  waters,  rivers,  turnpikes,  canals,  and 
railroads.  From  the  beginning  those  on  the  land  needed  cash  for 
taxes,  mortgage  payments,  and  necessities  they  could  not  grow 
or  build.  The  American  farmer,  always  an  enterpriser,  labored 
to  add  to  his  capital  plant;  and,  as  Chevalier  put  it  in  1835, 
'everyone  is  speculating,  and  everything  has  become  an  object  of 
speculation  .  .  .  cotton,  land,  city  and  town  lots,  banks,  rail- 
roads.' The  American  farmer  has  always  been  a  real-estate  specu- 
lator as  well  as  a  husbandman,  a  'cultivator,'  as  Veblen  said,  'of 
the  main  chance  as  well  as  of  the  fertile  soil,'  riding  the  land- 


THE  WORLD  OF  THE  SMALL  ENTREPRENEUR  5 

boom  that  characterized  United  States  history  up  to  1920.  Here, 
if  anywhere,  the  small  capitalist  had  his  rural  chance. 

Before  the  Civil  War,  images  of  business  were  largely  those 
conceived  by  farmers;  business,  in  the  American  mind,  was  com- 
posed of  moneylenders  and  bankers,  controlled  by  powerful 
vested  interests  in  eastern  urban  centers.  Yet,  as  Guy  Callender 
has  observed,  'The  stock  of  manufacturing  companies  was  usually 
owned  by  the  men  directly  interested  in  the  enterprise,  and  was 
rarely  bought  and  sold.  .  .  Such  capital  as  existed  in  1830  was 
chiefly  in  the  hand  of  small  savers,  who  were  naturally  more  in- 
terested in  security  than  in  the  chance  of  large  returns.  .  .  The 
great  majority  of  both  banks  and  insurance  companies  were  small 
concerns  with  less  than  $100,000  capital.'  Manufacturing  com- 
panies were  even  smaller. 

The  early  businessman  was  a  diversified  economic  type:  mer- 
chant, moneylender,  speculator,  shipper,  'cottage'  manufacturer. 
In  the  early  nineteenth-century  city,  this  undifferentiated  mer- 
chant was  at  the  top,  the  laborer  in  port,  machine  shop,  and 
livery  stable  at  the  bottom  of  society;  but  the  greatest  numbers 
were  handicrafters  and  tradesmen  of  small  but  independent 
means.  The  worker  was  no  factory  employee:  he  was  a  mechanic 
or  journeyman  who  looked  forward  to  owning  his  own  shop,  or 
a  farmer  to  whom  manufacturing  was  a  sideline,  carried  on  some- 
times as  a  cottage  industry.  As  the  cities  grew  with  industriali- 
zation, their  entrepreneurs  and  workers  formed  larger  markets 
for  the  farmers,  and  at  the  same  time  found  their  own  expand- 
ing markets  in  the  rural  areas. 

The  industrialization  of  America,  especially  after  the  Civil 
War,  gave  rise  not  to  a  broad  stratum  of  small  businessmen,  but 
to  the  captain  of  industry.  He  was  our  first  national  image  of  the 
middle-class  man  as  businessman,  and  no  one  has  ever  sup- 
planted him.  In  the  classic  image,  the  captain  was  at  once  a 
master  builder  and  an  astute  financier,  but  above  all  a  success. 
He  was  the  active  owner  of  what  he  had  created  and  then  man- 
aged. Nothing  about  the  operation  of  his  going  concern  failed  to 
draw  his  alert  attention  or  receive  his  loving  care.  In  his  role  as 
employer,  he  provided  opportunity  for  the  best  of  the  men  he 
hired  to  learn  from  working  under  him;  they  might  themselves 


6  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

save  a  portion  of  their  wages,  multiply  this  by  a  small  private 
speculation,  borrow  more  on  their  character,  and  start  up  on 
their  own.  Even  as  he  had  done  before  them,  his  employees  could 
also  become  captains  of  industry. 

The  glory  imputed  to  this  urban  hero  of  the  old  middle  class 
has  been  due  to  his  double-barrelled  success,  as  technologist-in- 
dustrialist and  as  financier-businessman.  In  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury these  two  distinct  activities  were  closely  enough  centered 
in  one  type  of  man  to  give  rise  to  the  undivided  image  of  the 
captain  of  industry  as  both  master  builder  and  organizer  of  all 
new  beginnings. 

The  middle-class  world  was  not  inhabited  entirely  by  un- 
graded, small  entrepreneurs.  Within  it  there  was  a  division  be- 
tween small  farmers  and  small  producers  on  the  one  hand,  and 
large  landlords  and  merchants  on  the  other.  There  were  also  those 
who  not  only  owned  no  property  but  were  themselves  the  prop- 
erty of  others;  yet  slavery,  the  glaring  exception  to  the  more 
generous  ideals  of  the  American  Revolution,  did  not  loom  so 
large  as  is  often  assumed.  It  was  confined  to  one  section,  did  not 
move  very  far  west,  and  was  abolished  in  mid-century.  Even  in 
the  slave-holding  states  in  1850,  only  30  per  cent  of  the  white 
families  held  slaves,  and  three-fourths  of  these  held  less  than 
ten  slaves;  the  average  slave-holder  was  a  small  independent 
farmer  who  worked  on  his  property  in  land  alongside  his  prop- 
erty in  men. 

In  the  end,  the  development  of  the  split  between  small  and 
large  property,  rather  than  any  sharp  red  line  between  those 
with  property  and  those  without  it,  destroyed  the  world  of  the 
small  entrepreneur.  Yet  the  historical  fulfilment  of  the  big  enter- 
priser was  hampered  and  delayed  for  long  decades  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  The  smaller  world  was  sheltered  by  international 
distance,  and  if  what  was  to  destroy  it  already  lay  within  it,  the 
small  entrepreneur  in  his  heyday  was  not  made  anxious  by  this 
emerging  fact  about  the  society  he  was  so  confidently  building. 
Between  mercantilism  and  subsistence  farming  in  the  beginning, 
and  monopoly  and  high  finance  at  the  end,  the  society  of  the 
small  entrepreneur  flourished  and  became  the  seedbed  of  middle- 
class  ideal  and  aspiration  and  myth. 


THE  WORLD  OF  THE  SMALL  ENTREPRENEUR  7 

2.  Property,  Freedom  &  Security 

The  most  important  single  fact  about  the  society  of  small  entre- 
preneurs was  that  a  substantial  proportion  of  the  people  owned 
the  property  with  which  they  worked.  Here  the  middle  class  was 
so  broad  a  stratum  and  of  such  economic  weight  that  even  by 
the  standards  of  the  statistician  the  society  as  a  whole  was  a 
middle-class  society:  perhaps  four-fifths  of  the  free  people  who 
worked  owned  property.  In  1830  Tocqueville  wrote,  'Great 
wealth  tends  to  disappear,  the  number  of  small  fortunes  to  in- 
crease.' Though  he  may  well  have  exaggerated  even  for  his  own 
time,  the  mood  he  reflects  was  that  of  the  people  about  whom  he 
wrote. 

This  world  did  in  reality  contain  propertyless  people,  but  there 
was  so  much  movement  in  and  out  of  the  petty-bourgeois  level 
of  farmers  that  it  appeared  that  they  need  not  remain  property- 
less  for  long.  Among  the  generation  of  elite  businessmen  who 
came  to  maturity  during  the  first  fifty  years  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury almost  half  were  of  lower-class  origin;  before  that,  under 
mercantilism,  and  afterward,  under  monopoly  capitalism,  the 
proportion  was  scarcely  one-fifth.  'One  could  always  begin  again 
in  America,'  John  Krout  and  Dixon  Ryan  Fox  pointed  out;  Tjank- 
ruptcy,  which  in  the  fixed  society  of  Europe  was  the  tragic  end 
of  a  career,  might  be  merely  a  step  in  personal  education.' 

At  the  same  time  the  rich  could  easily  be  tolerated— they  were 
so  few.  The  ideal  of  universal  small  property  held  those  without 
property  in  collective  check  while  it  lured  them  on  as  individuals. 
They  would  fight  alongside  those  who  already  had  it,  joining 
with  them  in  destroying  holdovers  from  the  previous  epoch  which 
hampered  the  way  up  for  the  small  owner. 

It  seemed  to  the  new  citizens,  as  it  has  seemed  to  many  after 
them,  that  the  road  to  success  was  purely  economic.  An  indi- 
vidual established  a  farm  or  an  urban  business  and  this  individual 
expanded  it,  rising  up  the  scale  of  success  as  he  expanded  his 
property.  That  this  was  so  could  be  plainly  seen:  you  cleared  a 
farm  or  founded  a  business;  you  cultivated  or  operated;  you  ex- 
panded the  business,  the  acreage,  the  profit.  In  the  beginning  of 
the  century  necessary  agricultural  tools  cost  $15  or  $20;  by  the 


8  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

middle  of  the  century  they  cost  $400  or  $500.  Men  rose  along 
with  the  expansion  of  their  property,  the  property  became  more 
valuable  both  because  of  their  work  and  because  of  rising  real- 
estate  values  in  the  long  epoch  of  land  boom.  When  Lincoln, 
in  1861,  spoke  the  language  of  the  small  entrepreneur  it  had  not 
yet  lost  its  meaning:  'The  prudent,  penniless  beginner  in  the 
world  labors  for  wages  a  while;  saves  a  surplus  with  which  to 
buy  tools  or  land  for  himself,  then  labors  on  his  own  account  an- 
other while,  and  at  length  hires  another  beginner  to  help  him.' 
Two  years  later  he  said:  'Property  is  the  fruit  of  labor.  .  .  That 
some  should  be  rich  shows  that  others  may  become  rich,  and 
hence  is  just  encouragement  to  industry  and  enterprise.' 

Under  the  pattern  of  individual  success  there  were  political 
and  demographic  conditions,  notably  the  land  policy,  which 
opened  economic  routes  to  the  masterless  individual.  The  wide 
distribution  of  small  property  made  freedom  of  a  very  literal  sort 
seem,  for  a  short  time,  an  eternal  principle.  The  relation  of  one 
man  to  another  was  a  relation  not  of  command  and  obedience 
but  of  man-to-man  bargaining.  Any  one  man's  decisions,  with 
reference  to  every  other  man,  were  decisions  of  freedom  and  of 
equality;  no  one  man  dominated  the  calculations  aflFecting  a 
market. 

Small  property  meant  security  in  so  far  as  the  market  mech- 
anism worked  and  slump  and  boom  balanced  each  other  into 
new  and  greater  harmonies.  The  wide  spread  of  rural  property 
was  especially  important  because  small  owners  had  one  security 
that  no  other  kind  of  holding  could  offer— the  security,  even  if 
at  low  levels,  of  the  shuttle  between  the  market  chance  and  sub- 
sistence. When  the  market  was  bad  or  cash  crops  failed,  the 
farmer,  if  frugal  and  wise,  could  at  least  eat  from  his  own 
garden. 

Noah  Webster,  in  1787,  asserted  that  tyranny  was  found  in  the 
power  to  oppress,  freedom  in  the  power  to  resist  oppression;  'In 
what  then,  does  real  power  consist?  The  answer  is  short,  plain- 
in  property.  .  .  A  general  and  tolerably  equal  distribution  of 
landed  property  is  the  whole  basis  of  national  freedom.  .  .  An 
equality  of  property,  with  the  necessity  of  alienation  constantly 
operating  to  destroy  combinations  of  powerful  families,  is  the 
very  soul  of  a  Republic.  While  this  continues,  the  people  will  in- 


THE  WORLD  OF  THE  SMALL  ENTREPRENEUR  9 

evitably  possess  both  power  and  freedom;  when  this  is  lost,  power 
departs,  hberty  expires,  and  a  commonwealth  will  inevitably 
assume  some  other  form.' 

In  owning  land  the  small  entrepreneur  owned  not  merely  an 
'investment':  he  owned  the  sphere  of  his  own  work,  and  because 
he  owned  it,  he  was  independent.  As  A.  Whitney  Griswold  has 
interpreted  Jefferson's  doctrine,  'Who  would  govern  himself  must 
own  his  own  soul.  To  own  his  own  soul  he  must  own  property, 
the  means  of  economic  security.'  Self-management,  work,  and 
type  of  property  coincided,  and  in  this  coincidence  the  psycho- 
logical basis  of  original  democracy  was  laid  down.  Work  and 
property  were  closely  joined  into  a  single  unit.  Working  skills 
were  performed  with  and  upon  one's  property;  social  status 
rested  largely  upon  the  amount  and  condition  of  the  property 
that  one  owned;  income  was  derived  from  profits  made  from 
working  with  one's  property.  There  was  thus  a  linkage  of  income, 
status,  work,  and  property.  And,  as  the  power  which  property 
gave,  like  the  distribution  of  property  itself,  was  widespread, 
their  coincidence  was  the  source  of  personal  character  as  well  as 
of  social  balance. 

Since  few  men  owned  more  property  than  they  could  work, 
differences  between  men  were  due  in  large  part  to  personal 
strength  and  ingenuity.  The  type  of  man  presupposed  and 
strengthened  by  this  society  was  willingly  economic,  possess- 
ing the  'reasonable  self-interest'  needed  to  build  and  operate 
the  market  economy.  He  was,  of  course,  more  than  an  economic 
man,  but  the  techniques  and  the  economics  of  production  shaped 
much  of  what  he  was  and  what  he  looked  forward  to  becoming. 
He  was  an  'absolute  individual,'  linked  into  a  system  with  no 
authoritarian  center,  but  held  together  by  countless,  free,  shrewd 
transactions. 


3.  The  Self-Balancing  Society 

The  world  of  small  entrepreneurs  was  self-balancing.  Within 
it  no  central  authority  allocated  materials  and  ordered  men  to 
specified  tasks,  and  the  course  of  its  history  was  the  unintended 
consequence  of  many  scattered  wills  each  acting  freely.  It  is  no 
wonder  that  men  thought  this  so  remarkable  they  called  it  a 


10  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

piece  of  Divine  Providence,  each  man's  hand  being  guided  as  if 
by  magic  into  a  preordained  and  natural  harmony.  The  science 
of  economics,  which  sought  to  explain  this  extraordinary  balance, 
which  provided  order  through  liberty  without  authority,  has  not 
yet  entirely  rid  itself  of  the  magic. 

The  providential  society  did  have  its  economic  troubles.  Its 
normal  rhythm  of  slump  and  boom  alternately  frightened  and 
exhilarated  whole  sections  and  classes  of  men.  Yet  it  was  not 
seized  by  cycles  of  mania  and  melancholia.  The  rhythm  never 
threw  the  economy  into  the  lower  depths  known  intimately  to 
twentieth-century  men,  and  for  long  years  there  were  no  fearful 
wars  or  threats  of  wars.  The  main  lines  of  its  history  were  lin- 
ear, not  cyclical;  technical  and  economic  processes  were  still  ex- 
panding, and  the  cycles  that  did  occur  seemed  seasonal  matters 
which  did  not  darken  the  whole  outlook  of  the  epoch.  Through 
it  all  there  ran  the  exhilaration  of  expansion  across  the  gigantic 
continent. 

In  the  building  of  his  new  world,  the  enterprising  individual 
had  also  to  build  a  government  that  would  guard  him  from  cen- 
tralized authority.  It  is  often  said  that  he  'overthrew  mercantil- 
ism,' and  this  is  true  in  the  narrower  meaning  of  the  term.  He 
did  throw  off  a  king  and  enthrone  in  his  place  the  free  market. 
This  market  did  not  reign  without  support  or  without  the  exercise 
of  political  authority,  but  economic  authority  was  dominant,  and 
it  was  automatic,  largely  unseen,  and,  in  fact,  seldom  experi- 
enced as  authority  at  all.  Political  authority,  the  traditional  mode 
of  social  integration,  became  a  loose  framework  of  protection 
rather  than  a  centralized  engine  of  domination;  it  too  was  largely 
unseen  and  for  long  periods  very  slight.  The  legal  framework 
guaranteed  and  encouraged  the  order  of  small  property,  but  the 
government  was  the  guardian,  not  the  manager,  of  this  order. 
'Let  us  be  content  with  the  results  which  have  been  achieved, 
and  which  as  clearly  indicate  others,  yet  more  brilliant,  in  the 
future,'  wrote  J.  D.  B.  DeBow,  the  director  of  the  1850  census. 
'The  industry  of  our  people  needs  no  monitors,  as  to  its  best  mode 
of  application  under  every  possible  circumstance— and,  least  of 
all,  monitors  made  out  of  stuff  such  as  our  politicians  usually  are. 
As  intelligence  is  generally  diffused  throughout  the  masses,  they 


THE  WORLD  OF  THE  SMALL  ENTREPRENEUR  11 

will  perceive  and  admit  this,  and  the  one  cry  everywhere  heard, 
shall  be,  "Let  us  alone." ' 

This  decentralized  and  unguided  economic  life  was  paralleled 
by  a  decentralization  of  the  military  order.  The  state,  erected  by 
and  for  the  small  entrepreneurs,  claimed  to  monopolize  the  means 
of  accepted  violence;  yet,  even  in  the  field  of  military  force,  con- 
ditions conspired  to  limit  government  and  to  make  for  a  political 
democracy  of  and  for  the  small  producer.  For  the  means  of  vio- 
lence, like  those  of  production,  were  necessarily  widely  dis- 
tributed; guns  were  locally  and  easily  produced.  Military  tech- 
nology did  provide  cannon  and  other  artillery,  but  on  the  whole, 
one  gun  meant  one  man,  and  the  basic  law  proclaimed:  'The  right 
of  the  people  to  keep  and  bear  arms  shall  not  be  infringed.'  By 
technical  necessity  as  well  as  by  law,  the  possible  means  of  co- 
ercion were  thus  scattered  among  the  population;  the  scattering 
of  economic  power  was  paralleled  by  a  scattering  of  military 
power.  Order  was  often  violently  preserved  without  benefit  of 
law:  if  there  were  cattle  thieves,  they  were  lynched;  if  there 
were  claim  jumpers,  they  were  driven  off. 

To  this  basis  of  decentralized  violence  inside  the  country,  there 
was  added  the  fact  of  geographic  isolation,  not  yet  bridged  by 
technology.  Certainly  no  large  standing  army  could  easily  be  jus- 
tified on  grounds  of  national  defense.  A  decentralized  militia, 
relying  on  volunteers  and  long  years  of  peace,  a  military  college 
to  which  cadets  were  appointed  by  politicians,  a  thoroughgoing 
civilian  control  of  military  establishments  and  policies— these 
military  foundations  allowed  for  political  democracy  in  the  soci- 
ety of  the  self-balancing  market. 

Competition  was  the  process  by  which  men  rose  and  fell  and 
by  which  the  economy  as  a  whole  was  harmonized.  But  for  men 
in  the  era  of  classic  liberalism,  competition  was  never  merely  an 
impersonal  mechanism  regulating  the  economy  of  capitalism,  or 
only  a  guarantee  of  political  freedom.  Competition  was  a  means 
of  producing  free  individuals,  a  testing  field  for  heroes;  in  its 
terms  men  lived  the  legend  of  the  self-reliant  individual.  In  every 
area  of  life,  liberals  have  imagined  independent  individuals  freely 
competing  so  that  merit  might  win  and  character  develop:  in  the 
free  contractual  marriage,  the  Protestant  church,  the  voluntary 


12  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

association,  the  democratic  state  with  its  competitive  party  sys- 
tem, as  well  as  on  the  economic  market.  Competition  was  the 
way  hberalism  would  integrate  its  historic  era;  it  was  also  a 
central  feature  of  the  classic  liberal's  style  of  life. 

With  no  feudal  tradition  and  no  bureaucratic  state,  the  abso- 
lute individualist  was  exceptionally  placed  in  this  liberal  society 
that  seemed  to  run  itself  and  in  which  men  seemed  to  make  them- 
selves. Individual  freedom  seemed  the  principle  of  social  order, 
and  in  itself  entailed  security.  A  free  man,  not  a  man  exploited, 
an  independent  man,  not  a  man  bound  by  tradition,  here  con- 
fronted a  continent  and,  grappling  with  it,  turned  it  into  a  million 
commodities. 


O 


2 


The  Transformation  of  Property 


Vv  HAT  happened  to  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur  is  best 
seen  by  looking  at  what  happened  to  its  heroes:  the  independent 
farmers  and  the  small  businessmen.  These  men,  the  leading  actors 
of  the  middle-class  economy  of  the  nineteenth  century,  are  no 
longer  at  the  center  of  the  American  scene;  they  are  merely  two 
layers  between  other  more  powerful  or  more  populous  strata. 
Above  them  are  the  men  of  large  property,  who  through  money 
and  organization  wield  much  power  over  other  men;  alongside 
and  below  them  are  the  rank  and  file  of  propertyless  employees 
and  workers,  who  work  for  wages  and  salaries.  Many  former  en- 
trepreneurs and  their  children  have  joined  these  lower  ranks,  but 
only  a  few  have  become  big  entrepreneurs.  Those  who  have  per- 
sisted as  small  entrepreneurs  are  not  much  like  their  nineteenth - 
century  prototypes,  and  must  now  operate  in  a  world  no  longer 
organized  in  their  image. 

The  free  entrepreneurs  of  the  old  middle  classes  have  dimin- 
ished as  a  proportion  of  the  gainfully  occupied.  They  no  longer 
enjoy  the  social  position  they  once  held.  They  no  longer  are 
models  of  aspiration  for  the  population  at  large.  They  no  longer 
fulfil  their  classic  role  as  integrators  of  the  social  structure  in 
which  they  live  and  work.  These  are  the  indices  of  their  decline. 
The  causes  of  that  decline  involve  the  whole  push  and  shove  of 
modern  industrial  society.  Its  consequences  ramify  deep  into  the 
world  of  twentieth-centiuy  America. 

In  the  midst  of  the  small  entrepreneur's  epoch,  John  Taylor 
had  written:  'There  are  two  modes  of  invading  private  property: 

13 


14  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

the  first,  by  which  the  poor  plunder  the  rich,  is  sudden  and  vio- 
lent; the  second,  by  which  the  rich  plunder  the  poor,  slow  and 
legal.  .  .  Whether  the  law  shall  gradually  transfer  the  property 
of  the  many  to  the  few,  or  insurrection  shall  rapidly  divide  the 
property  of  the  few  among  the  many,  it  is  equally  an  invasion 
of  private  property,  and  equally  contrary  to  our  constitutions.' 
The  course  of  U.S.  history  is  a  series  of  lessons  in  the  second  of 
these  'unconstitutional'  modes  of  invading  private  property. 

Changes  in  the  spread  and  type  of  property  have  transformed 
the  old  middle  class,  changed  the  way  its  members  live  and 
what  they  dream  about  as  political  men,  have  pushed  the  free 
and  independent  man  away  from  the  property  centers  of  the 
economic  world.  Democratic  property,  which  the  owner  himself 
works,  has  given  way  to  class  property,  which  others  are  hired 
to  work  and  manage.  Rather  than  a  condition  of  the  owner's 
work,  class  property  is  a  condition  of  his  not  having  to  work. 

The  individual  who  owns  democratic  property  has  power  over 
his  work;  he  can  manage  his  self  and  his  working  day.  The  indi- 
vidual who  owns  class  property  has  power  over  those  who  do  not 
own,  but  who  must  work  for  him;  the  owner  manages  the  work- 
ing life  of  the  non-owner.  Democratic  property  means  that  man 
stands  isolated  from  economic  authority;  class  property  means 
that,  in  order  to  live,  man  must  submit  to  the  authority  which 
property  lends  its  owner. 

The  right  of  man  'to  be  free  and  rooted  in  work  that  is  his 
own'  is  denied  by  the  transformation  of  property;  he  cannot 
realize  himself  in  his  work,  for  work  is  now  a  set  of  skills  sold  to 
another,  rather  than  something  mixed  with  his  own  property. 
His  work,  as  Eduard  Heiman  puts  it,  is  'not  his  own,  but  an  item 
in  the  business  calculation  of  somebody  else.' 

The  centralization  of  property  has  thus  ended  the  union  of 
property  and  work  as  a  basis  of  man's  essential  freedom,  and  the 
severance  of  the  individual  from  an  independent  means  of  live- 
lihood has  changed  the  basis  of  his  life-plan  and  the  psychologi- 
cal rhythm  of  that  planning.  For  the  entrepreneur's  economic  life, 
based  upon  property,  embraced  his  entire  lifetime  and  was  set 
within  a  family  heritage,  while  the  employee's  economic  life  is 
based  upon  the  job  contract  and  the  pay  period. 


THE  TRANSFORAAATION  OF  PROPERTY  15 

Secure  in  his  world,  the  old  entrepreneur  could  look  upon  his 
entire  life  as  an  economic  unity,  and  neither  his  expectations  nor 
his  achievements  were  necessarily  hurried.  In  his  century,  he  had 
the  chance  to  feel  that  his  effort  and  initiative  paid  off,  directly, 
securely,  and  freely.  Some  entrepreneurs  no  doubt  continue  to  ex- 
perience that  old  feeling,  but  the  bourgeois  rank  and  file  is  today 
locked  in  a  contest  against  all  of  big  capitalism's  'secondary 
modes  of  exploitation,'  and  many  of  them  fail.  For  the  popula- 
tion at  large,  the  idea  of  going  to  work  without  an  employer  is 
an  unserviceable  myth.  For  those  who  nevertheless  try  it,  it  is 
frequently  a  disastrous  illusion. 

1.  The  Rural  Debacle 

The  free  man  moving  west  did  not,  of  course,  know  what  his 
flight  meant  in  the  American  phase  of  world  capitalism's  develop- 
ment. He  did  not  understand  that  he  was  part  of  an  economic 
arrangement,  dependent  for  its  well-being  upon  the  structure  of 
foreign  markets  and  the  paying  off  of  the  U.S.  industrialists'  debts 
to  other  countries.  'Great  agricultural  surpluses,'  economic  his- 
torians have  shown,  'permitted  American  capitalism  to  grow  to 
maturity  behind  high  tariff  walls,  for  our  export  of  foodstuffs 
made  possible  the  importation  of  the  raw  materials  and  capital 
needed  for  the  development  of  American  industry.' 

By  high  tariffs,  post-Civil  War  industrialists  shut  off  foreign 
goods  that  might  compete  with  their  own  products  on  the  do- 
mestic market;  whatever  foreign  goods  and  services  they  needed 
were  bought  by  the  production  of  surplus  agricultural  goods.  In 
the  last  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  imports  of  raw  materials 
for  U.S.  manufacture  rose;  imported  manufactiued  goods  for 
the  consumer  dropped,  and  the  value  of  exported  foodstuffs  rose 
enormously— wheat,  by  the  millions  of  bushels,  pork,  by  the  mil- 
lions of  pounds. 

The  American  farmer,  as  Louis  Hacker  puts  it,  was  both  the 
tool  and  the  victim  of  the  rise  of  American  capitalism;  as  a  tool, 
his  surpluses  made  possible  the  construction  of  industry  behind 
high  tariffs;  as  a  victim,  he  paid  higher  prices  for  protected  goods 
as  well  as  high  interest  and  freight  rates. 


16  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

For  the  American  farmer  the  capitaHst  crisis  began  in  the  nine- 
teen-twenties,  during  which  he  experienced  nine  years  of  ruin- 
ously low  prices;  the  general  slump  of  the  next  decade  only 
worsened  his  condition.  During  the  'twenties  farm  prices 
dropped,  while  those  of  other  commodities  rose,  and,  when  all 
retail  prices  began  to  fall  after  1929,  farm  prices  fell  faster.  In 
the  same  period  the  average  value  of  farm  property  dropped, 
and  total  farm  income  plummeted;  cash  crop  receipts  were  cut 
to  about  one-fourth;  and  by  1929,  the  per  capita  income  of  the 
farm  population  was  about  two-thirds  lower  than  that  of  the 
rest  of  the  population. 

This  precipitous  slump  of  agriculture  coincided  with  long-term 
changes  in  farm  ownership;  the  proportion  of  owners  dropped, 
the  proportion  of  tenants  rose.  Mortgage  debt,  as  a  percentage 
of  total  farm  value,  more  than  doubled.  There  were  more  debts 
and  fewer  owners  to  pay  them.  In  the  decade  after  1925,  almost 
one-third  of  all  farms  changed  hands  by  forced  sales  of  one  kind 
or  another.  In  1930,  only  one-fourth  of  all  farm  operators,  com- 
pared to  over  one-half  in  1890,  owned  mortgage-free  farms. 
With  farm  ownership  thus  forfeited  by  tenantry  and  restricted 
by  mortgage,  most  American  farmers  were  no  longer  free  or 
independent. 

Moreover,  the  total  number  of  farmers,  regardless  of  their  con- 
dition, had  long  been  declining.  In  1820,  almost  three-quarters 
of  the  nation's  labor  force  was  engaged  in  agricultural  produc- 
tion. In  the  century  and  a  quarter  since  then,  during  most  of 
which  time  frontier  lands  were  still  available,  every  census  re- 
corded the  numerical  decline  in  the  proportion  of  farmers;  by 
1880,  they  comprised  one-half;  by  1949  farmers  of  all  sorts  made 
up  only  one-eighth  of  the  occupied  populace. 

The  causes  of  such  an  epochal  shift  for  an  entire  class  lie 
deep  within  the  total  system;  but  since  the  farmer  has  been  a 
creature  of  the  free  market,  which  tied  his  world  together,  the 
market  is  the  central  fact  to  consider: 

I.  With  the  opening  of  the  twentieth-century,  foreign  markets 
contracted  or  disappeared;  other  grasslands  of  the  world,  in 
newer  countries  wdth  lower  costs  and  higher  yield,  came  more 
and  more  into  production.  The  hope  of  foreign  outlets  and  high 
prices  faded;  between  1894  and  1898  nearly  one-fifth  of  gross 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  17 

farm  income  came  from  foreign  exports;  it  dropped  to  less  than 
one-tenth  by  the  middle  'thirties.  Europeans  could  not  buy  U.S. 
agricultural  goods  in  the  face  of  increased  U.S.  tariffs.  Europe 
had  no  gold;  America,  who  wanted  to  sell,  not  to  buy,  would 
not  accept  her  goods.  And  in  the  subsequent  epoch  of  permanent 
war  economies,  the  nations  of  the  world  were  doing  their  best 
to  become  self-suflBcient. 

II.  The  domestic  market  contracted.  The  rate  of  United  States 
population  growth  had  reached  its  peak  and  began  a  slow  arc 
downward;  there  was  no  more  big  immigration;  the  population 
began  to  level  off.  Further,  the  diet  of  this  market  altered  in  such 
a  way  as  to  constrict  the  sales  of  the  products  of  extensive  agri- 
culture. Even  if  income  rose,  the  proportion  spent  for  agricul- 
tural stuffs  did  not  rise  proportionately;  demand  for  food  is  lim- 
ited physiologically  as  demand  for  industrial  products  is  not. 

ui.  During  the  'thirties,  as  monopoly  features  of  the  economy 
began  to  be  more  apparent,  other  mechanisms  began  to  affect 
the  farmer:  his  key  economic  concern  has  always  been  the  ratio 
between  the  price  he  gets  for  his  product  and  the  price  he  must 
pay  for  the  things  he  buys.  During  the  depression  of  the  'thirties, 
when  agricultural  prices  dropped  about  70  per  cent  and  utility 
rates  did  not  drop  at  all,  the  farmer  could  afford  only  about  one- 
fourth  as  much  electricity  as  before  the  depression.  The  farmer's 
free  market  was  being  cut  into  by  urban  monopolists  who  prac- 
ticed a  new  and  more  profitable  kind  of  freedom— the  freedom  to 
hold  prices  up  by  cutting  production.  Thus  a  price  squeeze  was 
put  on  the  farmer:  as  he  entered  the  slump,  Caroline  Ware  and 
Gardiner  Means  observed,  the  wholesale  prices  of  farm  equip- 
ment dropped  only  15  per  cent,  while  production  was  cut  80  per 
cent;  but  the  prices  for  farm  produce  dropped  63  per  cent  while 
production  was  cut  only  6  per  cent.  Such  facts  make  clear  the  dif- 
ference between  the  administered  prices  of  the  industrial  cor- 
poration and  the  free  market  prices  of  the  farmer. 

IV.  In  no  other  area  of  the  economy  have  the  contradictions  of 
U.S.  capitalism  been  so  apparent  as  in  farming.  Yet  the  technol- 
ogy back  of  such  contradictions  has  only  begun  to  have  its  way 
in  the  rural  economy.  In  so  far  as  the  vision  of  classic  economic 
liberalism  was  realized  in  America,  it  worked  itself  out  on  the 
family  farm.  But  the  technological  revolution,  which  has  dire  con- 


18  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

sequences  for  old  middle  classes  everywhere,  largely  by-passed 
the  farmer;  it  may  now  be  seen  that,  in  its  later  period,  the  rural 
world  of  the  small  entrepreneur  existed  by  virtue  of  techno- 
logical backwardness.  Even  between  1900  and  1939,  when  manu- 
facturing increased  its  output  by  267  per  cent,  agricultural  out- 
put was  increased  by  only  60  per  cent. 

Yet,  even  so,  agricultural  production  rose  too  much.  For  under- 
lying the  numerical  decline  of  the  rural  populace  is  a  constant 
increase  in  productivity;  fewer  men  working  shorter  hours  can 
produce  more.  This  master  trend,  spurred  by  the  First  World 
War,  got  underway  in  earnest  during  World  War  II.  If  1910  is 
assumed  to  equal  100,  by  1945  farm  employment  had  dropped 
to  82,  while  production  per  worker  had  increased  to  209.  Behind 
these  figures  two  images  loom:  a  thousand  men  each  following 
a  mule,  and  a  big  tractor  driven  by  a  single  man.  These  are  ac- 
curate images:  during  the  generation  before  1940,  the  number  of 
tractors  used  on  farms  rose  from  10,000  heavy,  clumsy  machines 
to  2,000,000  light,  maneuverable,  rubber-tired  instruments  of 
production;  the  number  of  mules  and  horses  on  farms  was  cut 
by  about  half. 

In  the  second  quarter  of  the  twentieth  century,  for  the  first 
time  in  U.S.  history,  farm  employment  began  an  actual  decline. 
World  War  II  cut  the  farm  population  15  per  cent,  drained  ofi^ 
40  per  cent  of  the  men  under  45,  but  raised  crop  and  livestock 
production  30  and  40  per  cent.  By  1950,  four  million  farms  were 
able  to  produce  one-third  more  than  did  the  six  million  farms  of 
1940.  Thus,  one  underlying  cause  of  the  farm  problem  is  simply 
that  there  are  too  many  farmers.  The  demand  for  agricultural 
products  is  relatively  inflexible;  the  techniques  of  production  are 
constantly  becoming  more  productive.  As  Griswold  has  indicated, 
the  result  has  been  'the  underemployment  of  agricultural  labor 
shown  up  so  vividly  by  the  war,  the  price-depressing  surpluses, 
the  low  income,  and  the  correspondingly  inferior  cultural  oppor- 
tunities.' 

Farming  has  thus  moved  in  a  fuU  circle:  what  was  once  as- 
sumed to  be  a  frontier  outlet  is  now,  in  the  dry  words  of  a  De- 
partment of  Agriculture  expert,  'a  definite  lack  of  employment 
opportunities  in  agricultural  production.'  Yet  the  consequences 
of  the  technological  revolution  for  the  American  farmer  go  be- 


THE  TRANSFORAAATION  OF  PROPERTY  19 

yond  the  fact  of  numerical  decline.  This  revolution  emphasizes 
the  fact  that  an  'overproduction  crisis'  like  that  of  the  'thirties 
hangs  as  a  constant  threat  over  the  farmers  and  over  any  plan 
that  may  be  made  for  them. 

Within  the  rural  populace,  the  market  mechanics  and  the  tech- 
nological motors  of  social  change  have  been  cutting  down  the 
proportion  of  free  entrepreneurs.  For  at  least  fifty  years  the 
American  ideal  of  the  family-sized  farm  has  been  becoming 
more  and  more  an  ideal  and  less  and  less  a  reality.  In  1945  full 
owners  of  farms  made  up  only  6  per  cent  of  the  nation's  civilian 
labor  force. 

The  rural  middle  class  has  been  slowly  subjected  to  a  polari- 
zation, which,  if  continued,  will  destroy  the  traditional  character 
of  farming,  splitting  it  into  subsistence  cultivators,  wage-workers, 
and  sharecroppers  on  the  one  hand,  and  big  commercial  farmers 
and  rural  corporations  on  the  other.  By  1945,  2  per  cent  of  all 
farms  contained  40  per  cent  of  all  farm  land. 

Back  of  this  drift  to  larger  scale  and  increasing  concentration 
is  the  machine,  which  has  made  farming  a  highly  capitalized 
business.  A  tractor-operated  farm  requires  from  30  to  50  per  cent 
more  capital  than  a  horse-operated  unit.  According  to  a  repu- 
table business  journal,  a  'typical  Iowa  farmer'  in  1946  would 
have  around  160  acres,  which  might  cost  anywhere  from  $100  to 
$300  an  acre— at  a  minimum,  '$16,000  for  land.'  In  addition,  'such 
a  farmer  would  need  about  $33,000  of  original  investment  in 
capital  assets,'  $30,000  for  buildings  and  equipment,  and  $3000 
in  working  capital. 

The  low  rate  at  which  farm  machinery  is  normally  used  accel- 
erates this  trend.  A  manufacturer  can  expect  a  big  lathe  to  be 
used  two  thousand  hours  a  year;  a  farmer  can  expect  only  fifty 
hours  from  his  hay  baler.  To  make  the  baler  pay  the  farmer  buys 
more  land  on  which  to  use  it:  average  farm  size  has  jumped  from 
138  acres  in  1910  to  195  in  1945.  If  the  ordinary  small  farmer 
mechanizes  without  expanding  his  holding,  the  overhead  for 
repair  and  depreciation  will  get  out  of  bounds.  Either  he  must 
sell  out,  or  try  to  hire  out  his  machines  to  his  neighbors. 

The  largest  proportion  of  all  agricultural  commodities  has 
always  been  produced  by  a  comparatively  few  large  farms;  but 


20  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

over  the  last  two  or  three  decades  this  concentration  has  in- 
creased sharply.  Farm  prices  rose  greatly  during  World  War  II, 
but  less  than  a  tenth  of  the  farmers  received  one-half  of  the  total 
farm  income.  In  such  periods  of  farm  prosperity  the  farmer 
as  real-estate  speculator  increases  the  centralization;  many  mar- 
ginal producers  are  thus  eliminated,  as  farm  land  becomes  even 
more  concentrated,  farmers  fewer  and  richer. 

Whether  or  not  a  tenant  farmer  or  a  rural  wage-worker  has  an 
easy  chance  to  climb  the  agricultural  ladder  from  rural  wage- 
worker  to  tenant  to  mortgaged  owner  to  full  owner  is  a  question 
taken  seriously  only  in  popular  fantasy.  Just  what  the  chance  to 
climb  may  be  and  what  the  trend  has  been  are  difficult  to  show. 
But  this  much  is  certain:  in  the  forty  years  after  1890,  the  abso- 
lute number  of  young  farmers  declined,  and,  among  young  men 
still  on  the  farm,  about  50  per  cent  more  started  as  tenants  than 
as  owners.  Many  of  them  continued  as  tenants;  many  left  for  the 
city  because  they  could  not  start  as  owners  or  did  not  see  the 
chances  to  rise  to  full  ownership.  To  many  of  these,  the  ladder 
has  indeed  seemed  a  treadmill:  they  have  expressed  their  appre- 
ciation of  rural  life  and  of  its  chances  by  joining  the  rural  exodus. 

Farming  is  not  yet  rationalized,  but  the  rural  world  of  the 
small  entrepreneur  is  already  gone.  The  industrial  revolution, 
only  now  getting  under  way  on  the  farm,  already  has  determined, 
in  Griswold's  words,  that  'a  self-sufiBcient  farm  in  our  time  is  more 
likely  to  be  a  haunt  of  illiteracy  and  malnutrition  than  a  well- 
spring  of  democracy.'  The  industrial  revolution  tends  to  draw  the 
family  farm  into  its  orbit,  or  leave  it  stranded  in  an  archaic  sub- 
sistence economy. 

2.  Business  Dynamics 

Nevertheless,  as  a  broad  American  stratum,  the  small  entre- 
preneurs are  still  mainly  people  on  farms.  Men  entering  the  city 
seldom  have  acquired  business  properties  and  become  free  pro- 
ducers and  traders;  on  the  contrary,  as  members  or  potential 
members  of  the  old  middle  class,  they  have  been  destroyed.  The 
small  urban  entrepreneur  has  never  formed  a  broad  stratum 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  21 

which,  like  the  rural,  could  enact  a  key  role  in  the  shaping  of  a 
free  society.  The  city  never  matched  the  countryside:  neat  rows 
of  independent  shops  never  grew  up  to  become  the  equivalents 
of  sections  of  land.  Industrial  plants  and  retail  stores  were  not 
given  to  smaller  men  as  were  farms,  and  the  capital  required  to 
start  new  businesses  became  greater  in  rough  proportion  to  tech- 
nological progress.  There  was  never  any  Homestead  Act  for  the 
would-be  urban  entrepreneur,  although  for  manufacturers  the 
tariff  was  something  of  a  Homestead  Act.  Industrialization  does 
not  necessarily  develop  a  private  centralization  of  enterprises, 
with  resultant  diflBculties  for  small  entrepreneurs,  but  that  is  the 
way  it  has  worked  out  in  America. 

Even  before  the  Civil  War,  as  the  new  transportation  network 
began  to  knit  localities  into  a  national  market,  local  artisans 
began  to  work  for  merchant  capitalists.  The  need  for  raw  mate- 
rials and  capital  and  for  outlets  to  the  national  market  soon 
caused  the  independent  producer  to  become  dependent  upon 
bigger  men.  The  businessman  of  the  city,  who  was  tied  to  the 
technologist,  considered  it  his  role  to  organize  technology  and 
labor  and  become  their  profitable  link  with  the  protected  mar- 
ket. And  as  the  nation  grew  up,  so  did  its  heroes:  not  big  farm- 
ers, but  big  businessmen,  though  often  called  by  other  names, 
rose  to  national  eminence.  By  the  'nineties,  William  Dean  How- 
ells'  Man  Who  Had  Risen  was  supplementing  Walt  Whitman's 
Man  in  the  Open  Air. 

In  the  twentieth  century,  technology  continued  rapidly  to  ex- 
pand; but  expansion  of  the  market  took  place  much  more  slowly. 
In  the  attempt  to  stabilize  matters,  the  captains  of  industry  began 
to  draw  together,  and  out  of  their  epic  competition  there  emerged 
impersonal  monopoly.  The  freedom  to  compete— the  main  prin- 
ciple of  order  in  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur— became 
the  freedom  to  shape  the  new  society.  As  the  concentration  of 
private  enterprise  began  to  change  the  type  of  businessman  that 
prevailed,  the  Captain  of  Industry  gave  way  to  the  Rentier,  the 
Absentee  Owner,  the  Corporation  Executive,  and  a  type  presently 
to  be  described,  the  New  Entrepreneur. 

Neither  the  Rentier  nor  the  Absentee  Owner,  however,  is,  in 
the  public  mind,  a  productively  competitive  man.   Each  is  a 


22  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

coupon  clipper  and  a  parasite,  either  a  stealthy  miser  or  a  lavish 
consumer;  theirs  is  not  the  business  life  of  competition,  and  even 
liberal  economists  deplore  their  economic  role.  The  Corporation 
Executive  has  never  been  a  popular  middle-class  idol;  as  part  of 
an  impersonal  corporation,  he  is  too  aloof  to  have  a  friendly  repu- 
tation among  smaller  men.  As  an  engineer  he  is  part  of  inexor- 
able science,  and  no  economic  hero;  as  a  businessman  he  is  part 
of  the  hidden  world  of  finance,  where  all  the  big  money  mysteri- 
ously ends  up. 

None  of  these  newer  types  of  economic  men  has  quite  filled 
the  heroic  place  of  the  old,  undivided  captain,  who  has  gradually 
taken  on  a  somewhat  bloated,  predatory,  and  overbearing  shape. 
The  more  he  became  a  big  financier  and  the  less  an  inventive 
organizer  of  the  small  factory— which  everyone  could  see  was 
producing  things— the  more  sinister  this  predatory  image  became. 
The  big  businessman  was  generalized  into  the  Financial  Magnate, 
who,  living  in  the  lawful  shade  of  society,  uses  other  people's 
money  for  his  own  profit.  Yet,  as  it  has  been  often  difficult  to 
distinguish  a  dirt  farmer  from  a  real-estate  operator,  so  has  it 
been  hard  to  distinguish  a  genuine  captain  of  industry,  even  in 
the  captain's  heyday,  from  a  generalissimo  of  high  finance.  Per- 
haps the  urban  American  businessman  has  always  been  some- 
thing of  both. 

If  the  old  middle  classes  were  to  find  a  hero  in  the  city,  he 
would  have  to  be  from  the  small-business  strata.  And  so  the  small 
businessman,  especially  with  the  general  decline  of  the  farmer, 
has  come  to  be  seen  as  the  somewhat  woebegone  heir  of  the  old 
captain's  tradition,  even  if  only  by  default.  The  harder  his  strug- 
gle becomes,  the  more  sympathetic  and  heroic  his  image  is 
drawn;  and  yet  he  can  never  live  up  to  the  heritage  invented 
for  him.  More  and  more,  it  has  become  in  his  eyes  a  permanent 
burden  rather  than  a  glory  to  lean  on  in  times  of  temporary 
trouble.  As  image  he  remains  a  prop  to  the  captain-become- 
monopolist;  as  reality  he  persists  more  as  a  political  than  as  a 
business  force. 

During  the  last  several  decades,  the  proportion  of  businessmen 
has  stood  at  about  8  per  cent  of  the  nation's  working  force,  and 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  23 

in  the  urban  world  has  decHned  from  17  per  cent  in  1870 
to  12  per  cent  in  1940.  Their  remarkable  persistence  as  a  stratum, 
however,  should  not  be  confused  with  the  well-being  of  each 
individual  enterprise  and  its  owner-manager.  While,  as  an  aggre- 
gate, small  businessmen  persist  and  hold  their  own,  the  compo- 
sition of  this  aggregate  changes  rapidly,  and  the  economic  well- 
being  of  its  members  undergoes  shocking  ups  and  dovsms. 

In  the  four  decades  prior  to  World  War  II,  the  number  of 
firms  in  existence  rose  from  1  to  2  million,  but  during  the  same 
period  nearly  16  million  firms  began  operation,  and  at  least  14 
million  went  out  of  business.  There  is  a  great  flow  of  entrepre- 
neurs and  would-be  entrepreneurs  in  and  out  of  the  small-busi- 
ness stratum,  as  each  year  hundreds  of  thousands  fail  and  others, 
some  new  to  the  game,  some  previous  failures,  start  out  again  on 
the  brave  venture. 

The  great  bulk  of  businesses  are  small  outfits,  which  do  not 
last  long.  In  fact,  the  turnover  rate  of  one-man  enterprises  in 
1940  was  almost  as  high  as  the  average  annual  separation  rate 
for  factory  workers  during  the  prewar  decade.  Tt  is  apparent,* 
as  J.  H.  Cover  the  economist  says,  after  examining  the  vital  sta- 
tistics of  small  business,  'that  optimism  exceeds  understanding 
in  the  cases  of  possibly  two-thirds  of  our  new  proprietors.' 

It  is  an  infant  death  rate  in  two  senses:  both  the  small  and 
the  new  concerns  typically  fail.  These  two  senses  are  related: 
in  those  industries  where  the  capital  involved  in  starting  a  new 
business  is  prohibitive  to  small  entrepreneurs  there  often  is  sta- 
bility; and  in  those  industries  where  capital  requirements  do  not 
stand  in  the  way,  the  problems  of  survival  are  naturally  greater. 

It  might  be  supposed  that  all  these  failures  and  new  begin- 
nings are  only  the  unfit  being  eliminated  by  the  fit  in  a  normal 
competitive  process.  But  such  a  view  overlooks  the  fact  that  the 
continuation  of  bankruptcies  and  failures  would  seem  to  indicate 
that  the  unfit  are  often  replaced  by  the  unfit;  and  that,  since  the 
trend  of  bankruptcies  is  often  upward,  it  might  even  be  that  the 
number  of  unfit  often  increases. 

Back  of  the  failures  is  the  general  fact  that  a  larger  number 
of  small  businesses  are  competing  for  a  small  share  of  the  market. 
The  stratum  of  urban  entrepreneurs  has  been  Harrowing,  and 


24  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

within  it  a  concentration  has  been  going  on.  Small  business  be- 
comes smaller,  big  business  becomes  bigger. 

The  business  world  is  less  homogeneous  now  than  seventy 
years  ago:  businessmen  now  work  in  a  bewildering  variety  of 
types  and  sizes  of  enterprises,  from  the  sidestreet  laundry  to  the 
General  Motors  Corporation.  At  the  bottom  are  a  multitude  of 
small  firms,  worth  little  financially,  which  do  not  produce  or  sell 
much  of  the  nation's  total  goods  and  services,  and  do  not  employ 
many  of  the  people  at  work.  In  1939  the  1,500,000  one-man  enter- 
prises made  up  almost  half  of  all  non-farming  businesses,  but 
engaged  only  6  per  cent  of  all  people  at  work  in  business.  At  the 
top  are  a  handful  of  firms  which  employ  the  bulk  of  the  people 
at  work,  produce  or  sell  most  of  the  goods  and  services  handled, 
and  hold  most  of  the  capital  goods  appropriated  to  private  use. 
In  1939,  1  per  cent  of  all  the  firms  in  the  country— 27,000  giants- 
engaged  over  half  of  all  the  people  working  in  business.  For 
about  thirty  years,  now,  three-fourths  of  U.S.  corporations  have 
got  only  about  5  per  cent  of  the  total  corporate  income. 

No  matter  which  year  is  studied,  or  what  criteria  are  used,  the 
fact  of  extreme  business  concentration  is  clear.  Over-all  measure- 
ments, however,  conceal  the  crucial  fact  that  concentration  varies 
a  great  deal  by  line  of  business.  Roughly  speaking,  the  business 
world  is  polarized  into  two  types:  large  industrial  corporations 
and  small  retail  or  service  firms. 

In  the  generation  before  World  War  II,  the  number  of  pro- 
prietors of  manufacturing  establishments  declined  34  per  cent; 
the  number  of  wage  and  salary  workers  employed  in  manufac- 
turing rose  27  per  cent.  Manufacturing  is  no  longer  a  small  busi- 
ness world;  it  is  increasingly  dominated  by  large-scale  bureau- 
cratic structures.  The  war  economy,  built  on  top  of  this  already 
extreme  concentration,  further  concentrated  American  industry. 

Retail  trade,  bottom  of  the  business  world  in  terms  of  persons 
engaged  and  value  of  business  transacted,  is  still  largely  domi- 
nated by  small  business.  The  sales  of  the  smallest  three-quarters 
of  retail  stores  represented  22  per  cent  of  the  total  1939  retail 
sales,  nearly  twice  that  of  the  smallest  three-quarters  of  the  manu- 
facturing firms.  As  far  as  making  up  any  dominant  section  of  the 
total  business  world,  the  small  businessman  can  now  be  seen  to 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  25 

exist  only  in  the  retail  and  service  industries,  and  to  a  lesser  ex- 
tent in  finance  and  construction. 

In  the  early  nineteenth  century  the  wholesaler  was  the  big  go- 
between  of  the  business  world:  he  was  able  to  control  the  small 
manufacturer  as  well  as  the  small  retailer,  for  both,  especially  the 
retailer,  were  often  dependent  upon  him  for  credit.  But  the  manu- 
facturer expanded  and  became  independent  of  the  wholesaler, 
often  taking  over  many  of  his  functions.  In  time,  the  retailer  also 
moved  in  on  the  wholesaler's  business.  Then  the  manufacturer 
tried  to  eliminate  both  wholesaler  and  retailer  by  selling  directly 
to  the  consumer. 

As  the  volume  of  production  rose  in  the  later  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, the  economic  system  was  confronted  with  capitalism's  pe- 
culiar and  crucial  problem:  there  is  no  profit  to  be  made  from 
huge  volume  unless  a  huge  market  exists.  As  technology  pushed 
the  manufacturer  into  higher  productivity,  he  was  confronted 
with  an  extremely  inefficient  and  wasteful  system  of  marketing. 
The  smaller  units  in  wholesaling  and  retailing— the  bulk  of  the 
old  urban  middle  class— had  become  a  brake  upon  the  technologi- 
cal wheels  of  capitalist  progress,  or  so  the  big  manufacturer 
thought. 

At  the  same  time,  the  retailer  was  also  growing  up.  The  de- 
partment store  is  a  stable  member  of  the  marketing  community: 
the  proportion  of  retail  sales  handled  by  department  stores  has 
not  fluctuated  very  widely  over  the  last  fifteen  years.  The  mail- 
order house  now  combines  many  of  the  features  of  the  depart- 
ment store  and  the  chain  and,  acting  at  a  distance,  reaches  into 
the  back  eddies  of  the  market.  As  this  system  of  mass  distributors 
began  slowly  to  emerge,  its  units  did  their  own  wholesaling,  from 
the  mass  producer  to  the  consumer.  As  supermarkets  mush- 
roomed, outdoing  the  chain  stores  in  the  technique  of  mass  dis- 
tribution, the  chains  began  to  imitate  their  supermarket  com- 
petitors, and  the  two  giants  of  the  retail  trade  battled  with  one 
another,  competing  far  more  than  little  businessmen  ever  could. 

As  wholesalers  were  displaced  by  retailers,  the  latter,  from 
the  central  position  of  those  close  to  the  business  at  hand,  began 
to  bring  pressure  on  the  manufacturers,  saying:  'Split  up  with 
us.  Your  low  costs  are  due  to  your  mass  production,  but  what 


26  OLD  MIDDLE  CUSSES 

good  would  your  mass  production  be  without  our  mass  distribu- 
tion? Cut  us  in/  The  manufacturer,  having  partly  thrown  oflF 
wholesaler  control,  being  confronted  now  by  another  contender 
for  his  profits,  replied  with  national  advertising  of  his  brand 
name  and  with  retail  outlets  of  his  own.  With  these  tools  he  has 
been  trying  to  dominate  both  retailer  and  wholesaler. 

Sears,  Roebuck  vice-president  T.  V.  Houser  sums  up  the  pres- 
ent trend:  on  the  one  hand,  there  is  'the  dominant  large  manu- 
facturers with  their  own  branded  lines,  distributing  their  prod- 
ucts through  thousands  of  independent  dealers;  on  the  other 
hand,  the  mass  distributor  with  his  many  and  various  branded 
lines,  buying  each  of  these  lines  from  smaller  manufacturers  .  .  . 
in  one  case,  the  manufacturer  determines  the  .  .  .  design,  qual- 
ity, price  and  production  schedules  [of  the  product];  while  in 
the  other  case  these  functions  are  assumed  by  the  mass  dis- 
tributor. .  .'  From  both  sides,  the  wholesaler  takes  the  brunt  of 
the  competitive  battle  of  the  marketeers,  and  loses  ground  to 
both. 

Not  all  domination  by  big  business,  however,  results  in  out- 
right mergers  or  bankruptcies  or  is  revealed  by  the  facts  of  con- 
centration. The  power  of  the  larger  businesses  is  such  that,  even 
though  many  small  businesses  remain  independent,  they  become 
in  reality  agents  of  larger  businesses.  The  important  point  is  that 
the  small  businessman  has  been  deprived  of  his  old  entrepre- 
neurial function. 

When  banks  demand  managerial  reforms  before  extending 
credit,  they  are  centralizing  the  initiative  and  responsibility  sup- 
posedly entailed  in  the  entrepreneurial  flair.  Many  small  business- 
men are  now  financed  by  supply  houses,  and  large  producers  and 
suppliers  not  only  set  the  prices  which  small  businesses  in  the 
industry  then  follow,  but  often  extend  credit  to  small  businesses; 
there  are  cases  in  which,  if  the  big  concern  extending  credit  were 
to  call  it  in,  many  small  men  would  be  ruined.  Such  dependency 
on  trade  credit  tends  to  reduce  the  small  businessman  to  an 
agent  of  the  creditor. 

The  independence  of  small  businessmen  is  also  curtailed  by 
'exclusive  dealing  contracts'  and  'full  line  forcing'  by  means  of 
which  manufacturers,  who  set  retail  prices  and  advertise  na- 
tionally, turn  small  retailers  into  what  amounts  to  salesmen  on 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  27 

commission  who  take  entrepreneurial  risks.  In  manufacturing, 
subcontracting  often  turns  the  small  subcontractor  into  what 
amounts  to  a  risk-taking  manager  of  a  branch  plant. 

It  might  be  thought  that  the  small  wholesaler,  retailer,  and 
manufacturer,  each  variously  affected  by  the  domination  of  large 
business,  would  get  together  against  their  common  foe,  but  they 
have  not  done  so  on  any  scale.  Instead,  the  small  retailer,  the 
largest  element  in  small  business,  has  sought  refuge  from  compe- 
tition in  the  national  brands  of  big  manufacturers  and  advertisers, 
and  has  demanded  and  got  such  stratagems  as  'fair  trade' 
legislation,  under  which  all  retailers  of  a  product  must  sell  at  a 
uniform  price.  Legislation  of  this  sort  means  that  such  competi- 
tion as  exists  goes  on  among  various  manufacturers,  in  whose 
field  monopoly  is  great,  rather  than  among  retailers,  among  whom 
monopoly  is  less  well  developed.  Moreover,  because  the  small 
manufacturer  is  largely  cut  off  from  the  small  retailer,  he  too 
comes  under  the  domination  of  the  big-scale  operator,  in  this 
case  the  big  retailer— the  chain  or  department  store,  who  as  large- 
scale  buyers  can  often  dominate  the  price  of  the  articles  they 
buy. 

Many  smaller  elements  of  the  old  middle  class  have  slowly 
been  ground  to  pieces.  As  the  contest  has  shifted  from  production 
to  salesmanship,  many  smaller  manufacturers  have  continued  to 
exist  by  becoming  direct  satellites  of  larger  manufacturing  con- 
cerns, and  many  retailers  have  become,  in  fact,  maintenance 
agencies  and  distributors  for  big  manufacturers.  Thus,  the  small 
manufacturer  and  the  small  retailer,  far  from  forming  an  alli- 
ance, are  locked  in  struggle  over  the  market,  in  the  course  of 
which  both  come  under  the  domination  of  larger  business. 

Distribution  is  the  home  of  small  business,  and  distribution  is 
one  of  the  most  wasteful  features  of  the  U.S.  economy.  In  food 
retailing,  for  example,  chains  have  definitely  decreased  the  gen- 
erous spread  between  farmer  and  consumer  prices,  A  retail  store 
cannot  be  run  efficiently  or  cheaply  unless  there  is  an  adequate 
turnover  per  store.  Chains  have  this  volume,  and  the  additional 
advantage  of  being  able  to  bring  in  salaried  experts  for  every 


28  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

department  of  the  business.  They  are  more  efficient  and  cheaper. 
In  them  the  entrepreneurial  flair  is  replaced  by  a  standardized 
procedure.  Buying,  display,  advertising,  merchandising,  atten- 
tion to  costs  are  each  centralized  and  managed  by  salaried  ex- 
perts in  chain,  department  store,  and  supermarket.  'We  must,' 
says  distribution  authority  A.  C.  Hoffman,  'either  accept  the  in- 
eptitude of  the  average  person  in  order  to  preserve  for  him 
some  measure  of  what  is  called  economic  individualism,  or  we 
must  accept  the  change  from  enterpriser  to  employee  status  in 
order  to  achieve  the  advantages  of  centralized  management.' 

As  the  processor's  influence  and  the  engineer's  ideas  are  tak- 
ing over  the  functions  of  independent  farmers,  so  the  big  manu- 
facturer and  the  engineer  of  distribution  are  eyeing  the  market- 
ing system,  the  home  of  the  small  businessmen.  The  old  middle 
classes,  on  the  farm  and  in  the  city,  are  clogging  the  wheels  of 
progress  as  envisioned  by  the  technologists  and  efficiency  experts. 

3.  The  Lumpen-Bourgeoisie 

Examining  the  statistics  that  indicate  the  sad  condition,  the 
heavy  rate  of  failure,  and  yet  the  curious  survival  of  tiny  busi- 
nesses and  farms,  one  is  reminded  of  Balzac's  unkind  remark 
made  in  another  connection:  'insignificant  folk  cannot  be  crushed, 
they  lie  too  flat  beneath  the  foot.'  If  we  may  speak  of  a  'lumpen- 
proletariat,'  set  off  from  other  wage  workers,  we  may  also  speak 
of  a  'lumpen-bourgeoisie,'  set  off  from  other  middle-class  ele- 
ments. For  the  bottom  of  the  entrepreneurial  world  is  so  dif- 
ferent from  the  top  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  the  two  should  be 
classified  together. 

In  the  city  the  lumpen-bourgeoisie  is  composed  of  a  multitude 
of  firms  with  a  high  death  rate,  which  do  a  fraction  of  the  total 
business  done  in  their  lines  and  engage  a  considerably  larger 
proportion  of  people  than  their  quota  of  business.  Thus,  ten  years 
ago  over  half  of  the  retail  stores  did  only  9  per  cent  of  the  busi- 
ness but  engaged  21  per  cent  of  all  the  people  in  retail  trade. 
The  true  lumpen-bourgeoisie,  however,  employ  no  workers  at 
all:  the  proprietors  and  their  family  members  do  the  work,  fre- 
quently sweating  themselves  night  and  day.  At  the  bottom  of  the 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  29 

depression,  the  'proprietor's  withdrawal'  was  Hberally  estimated 
at  $9.00  a  week  for  stores  with  sales  under  $10,000.  Here,  at  the 
bottom  of  the  twentieth-century  business  world,  lies  the  owner- 
operator  who,  in  the  classic  image,  is  the  independent  man  in 
the  city. 

But  it  is  on  the  farm  with  its  dwarfish  means  of  production 
that  the  small  entrepreneur  has  persisted  as  a  large  proportion 
of  the  marginal  victims  of  the  old  middle  class.  Twenty  years 
ago,  at  the  1929  peak  of  business  prosperity,  nearly  half  of  the 
nation's  farms  produced  less  than  $1000  worth  of  products,  in- 
cluding those  used  by  the  family,  but  this  least  productive  half 
contributed  only  11  per  cent  of  all  the  products  sold  or  traded  by 
farmers.  By  the  middle  'forties,  at  the  peak  of  the  farm  boom, 
the  relative  figures  had  not  changed  much:  40  per  cent  of  all 
farms  received  less  than  $1000  a  year;  one-fourth  yielded  $600 
or  less.  The  rural  malnutrition  rate  has  been  twice  as  high  as  the 
urban,  and  it  is  on  the  farm  that  we  find  the  national  highest 
birth  and  infant  mortality  rates.  A  full  third  of  the  farmers  live 
in  rural  slums,  in  houses  virtually  beyond  repair;  two-thirds  are 
'inadequately  housed.'  In  1945,  only  three  out  of  ten  U.S.  farm- 
ers had  mechanical  refrigerators,  only  four  had  kitchen  sinks  with 
drains.  The  small  farmer  and  his  family  are  caught  up  in  an  inef- 
ficient drudgery,  and  many  are  'independent'  only  part  of  the 
time,  hiring  themselves  to  large  farmers  the  rest,  and  all  the  time 
hovering  above  tenantry  only  by  barbaric  overwork  and  under- 
consumption. 

Engineers  point  out  that  'one-fifth  of  our  original  area  of  till- 
able land'  has  been  ruined  for  further  cultivation;  'a  third  of  what 
remains  has  already  been  badly  damaged.  Another  third  is  highly 
vulnerable.'  Among  the  reasons  for  this,  H.  H.  Bennett,  chief  of 
a  service  in  the  Department  of  Agriculture,  pointed  out  in  1946, 
is  the  fact  that  'too  much  of  the  land  traditionally  has  been  in 
the  hands  of  the  untutored  and  the  inept.  .  .  Under  the  names 
of  peasant,  farmer,  rustic,  and  country  fellow,  these  individuals 
have  been  synonymous,  for  generations,  with  all  that  is  naive, 
uneducated,  and  backward.  Possessed  frequently  of  such  virtues 
as  thrift  and  diligence,  they  have  nevertheless  often  assumed  a 
scornful  attitude  toward  education  and  the  educated.  And  too 


30  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

often,  the  farm  has  been  the  last  resort  to  which  men  unsuccess- 
ful in  other  fields  have  turned.' 

The  midget  entrepreneur,  on  the  farm  and  in  the  city,  is  eco- 
nomically sensitive  to  the  business  cycle;  his  insecurities  are 
tightly  geared  to  it.  Slight  shifts  in  the  direction  or  volume  of 
business  can  be  reflected  sharply  in  his  rate  of  profit.  From 
month  to  month,  he  may  exist  in  acute  anxiety;  even  slight  eco- 
nomic forces,  outside  his  control,  may  swing  him  ofl:  balance  and 
lower  his  level  of  psychic  security.  Once  no  individual  could 
direct  the  market,  but  now  the  small  man  feels,  often  correctly, 
that  it  is  fixed  against  him. 

As  owner,  manager,  and  worker,  the  marginal  victim  typically 
uses  liis  family  to  help  out  in  store,  farm,  or  shop.  Economic  life 
thus  coincides  with  family  life.  In  the  hole-in-the-wall  business, 
also  known  as  a  Mom-and-Pop  store,  the  parents  can  keep  a  con- 
stant eye  on  each  other  and  on  the  children.  Such  economic  free- 
dom as  the  family  enterprise  may  enjoy  is  often  purchased  by 
lack  of  freedom  within  the  family  unit.  It  is,  in  fact,  as  Wilhelm 
Reich  has  noted,  a  feature  of  such  petty-bourgeois  life  that  ex- 
treme repression  is  often  exercised  in  its  patriarchal  orbit.  Child 
labor,  often  sweated  child  labor,  has  its  home  in  the  lumpen- 
bourgeoisie.  Of  all  industrial  categories  it  is  the  farm  and  the 
retail  store  that  contain  the  highest  proportion  of  free  enter- 
prisers—and the  highest  proportion  of  'unpaid  family  workers.' 
Business  competition  and  economic  anxiety  thus  come  out  in 
family  relations  and  in  the  iron  discipline  required  to  keep  afloat. 
Since  there  is  little  or  no  outlet  for  feelings  beyond  the  confines 
of  the  shop  or  farm,  members  of  these  families  may  grow  greedy 
for  gain.  The  whole  force  of  their  nature  is  brought  to  bear  upon 
trivial  affairs  which  absorb  their  attention  and  shape  their  char- 
acter. They  come  to  exercise,  as  Balzac  has  said,  'the  power  of 
pettiness,  the  penetrating  force  of  the  grub  that  brings  down 
the  elm  tree  by  tracing  a  ring  under  the  bark.' 

The  family  circle  is  closed  in  and  often  withdrawn  into  itself, 
thus  encouraging  strong  intimacies  and  close-up  hatreds.  The 
children  of  such  families  are  often  the  objects  upon  which  paren- 
tal frustrations  are  projected.  They  are  subjected  alternately  to 
overindulgence,  which  springs  from  close  parental  competition 


THE  TRANSFORAAATION  OF  PROPERTY  31 

for  their  affection,  and  to  strong  discipline,  which  is  based  on  the 
parents'  urge  to  'make  the  child  amount  to  something.'  In  the 
meantime  continual  deprivations  are  justified  in  terms  of  the 
future  success  of  the  children,  who  must  give  up  things  now,  but 
who,  by  doing  so,  may  legitimately  claim  the  rewards  of  great 
deference  and  gratification  in  the  future.  There  is  evidence  that 
the  coming  to  adolescence  of  the  lumpen-bourgeois  child  is  a 
painful  juncture  fraught  with  many  perils  for  parent  and  child, 
and  perhaps  also  for  society. 

Behind  the  colorless  census  category  'unpaid  family  worker,' 
there  lie  much  misery  and  defeat  in  youth.  That  too  was  and  is 
part  of  the  old  middle-class  way.  Perhaps  in  the  nineteenth-cen- 
tury it  paid  off:  the  sons,  or  at  least  one  of  the  sons,  would  take 
over  his  equipped  station,  and  the  daughter  might  better  find  a 
husband  who  would  thus  be  set  up.  But  the  average  life  of  these 
old  middle-class,  especially  urban,  units  in  the  twentieth  century 
is  short;  the  coincidence  of  family-unit  and  work-situation  among 
the  old  middle  class  is  a  pre-industrial  fact.  So  even  as  the  cen- 
tralization of  property  contracts  their  'independence,'  it  liberates 
the  children  of  the  old  middle  class's  smaller  entrepreneurs. 

The  diflBculties  of  making  a  stable  life-plan  further  augment  the 
competitive  anxieties  and  family  tensions  of  the  lumpen-bour- 
geoisie. On  the  one  hand,  the  small  man  generally  lives  longer 
than  the  small  business,  so  in  many  cases  the  business  cannot 
provide  income  for  a  lifetime.  On  the  other  hand,  the  elderly 
proprietor  of  a  small  business  frequently  has  difficulty  replacing 
himself.  He  builds  up  a  struggling  enterprise  over  the  years  by 
hard  work  and  fear,  and  then  he  wants  to  retire;  but  who  could 
replace  him?  He  has  built  up  a  little  business  and  his  impending 
retirement  or  death  damages  the  credit  standing  of  the  enter- 
prise with  which  he  has  been  so  personally  identified. 

The  economic  situation  of  the  lumpen-bourgeoisie  leads  to 
insecurity,  and  often  to  petty  aggressiveness.  Their  prestige  is 
often  considered  by  them  to  be  low,  in  relation  to  those  on  whom 
their  eyes  are  fixed— the  larger,  more  successful  entrepreneurs. 
And,  over  the  last  twenty  years,  they  have  felt  a  denial  of  defer- 
ence in  relation  to  workers  organized  in  successful  unions. 

To  these  economic  and  social  bases  of  insecurity  and  frustra- 
tion may  be  added  a  more  personal  source,  aptly  noted  by  Har- 


32  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

old  D.  Lasswell:  running  a  business  often  involves  a  calculating 
posture  toward  other  people  which  may  cause  a  certain  amount 
of  guilt.  The  marginal  victim  is  often  economically  compelled  to 
calculate,  plan,  and  evaluate  his  own  actions  and  impulses,  as 
well  as  those  of  his  wife  and  children  who  help  him  in  the  busi- 
ness; he  must  do  so  in  the  cold  light  of  his  economic  goal  and 
often  via  sharp  economic  practices.  So,  the  intensification  of 
work,  the  deferral  of  consumption  for  his  family  and  himself,  is 
justified  by  the  high  premium  on  thrift  and  respectability. 

During  business  hours  at  least,  he  must  allow  the  customer 
always  to  be  right.  Subservient  to  any  one  above  him,  to 
whose  level  he  may  aspire  and  from  whom  he  may  suffer  petty 
rebuffs,  the  lumpen-bourgeois  often  turns  harshly  against  wage- 
workers  in  the  abstract,  although  in  so  far  as  they  are  among  his 
customers  he  may  have  to  suppress  such  targets  of  aggression. 

The  capitalist  spirit,  Werner  Sombart  has  written,  combines  a 
spirit  of  adventure,  a  desire  for  gain,  and  the  middle-class  virtues 
of  the  respectable  citizen.  Among  those  smaller  bourgeois,  the 
desire  for  gain  now  seems  uppermost;  it  becomes  the  focus  of 
virtue,  and  as  the  adventurous  spirit  is  replaced  by  a  search  for 
the  sure  fix,  the  very  norms  of  respectability  become  psychologi- 
cal traps  and  sources  of  guilt.  The  calculation  for  gain  spreads 
into  the  whole  social  life,  as  the  lumpen-bourgeois  man  thinks  of 
his  social  universe,  including  the  members  of  his  family,  as  fac- 
tors in  his  struggle,  a  struggle  in  which  he  is  often  as  unsuccessful 
as  he  is  ambitious. 

The  old  bourgeois,  the  man  of  measure  for  whom  wealth  was 
not  necessarily  an  end  in  itself  but  rather  a  means  of  continuing 
his  unruffled  way  of  life,  the  man  who  did  not  frenziedly  reach 
out  for  customers  but  patiendy  expected,  like  a  territorial  prince, 
a  fenced-off  reserve  of  his  share— that  man  is  gone.  Inner  ease 
and  wide  range  no  longer  derive  from  the  business  life  of  the 
old  middle  class  on  any  level,  and  certainly  not  on  its  lumpen 
stratum;  from  the  lumpen-bourgeoisie  a  sordid  style  and  narrow 
ideas  are  more  likely  to  come.  No  longer  can  the  smallest  entre- 
preneurs be  characterized  as  among  that  middle  class  of  which 
W.  E.  H.  Lecky  wrote,  in  1896,  that  it  was  'distinguished  beyond 
all  others  for  its  political  independence,  its  caution,  its  solid  prac- 
tical intelligence,  its  steady  industry,  its  high  moral  average,'  or 


THE  TRANSFORMATION  OF  PROPERTY  33 

which  Georges  Sorel  characterized  as  a  class  of  serious  moral 
habits,  filled  with  its  own  dignity,  having  the  energy  and  will  to 
govern  a  country  without  a  centralized  bureaucracy.  No  longer  is 
there  the  effective  will  to  power  of  the  old  middle  class,  but  rather 
the  tenacious  will  to  fight  off  encircling  competitive  menaces. 
From  this  series  of  small-scale  wretchedness,  a  fretful  assertive- 
ness  is  fed,  human  relations  are  poisoned,  and  a  personality  is 
formed  with  which  it  is  not  pleasant  to  exchange  political  greet- 
ings. The  small  entrepreneur  is  scared;  so  he  embraces  ideologies 
and  struggles  for  prestige  in  ways  not  entirely  befitting  standard 
images  of  the  free  businessman  and  the  independent  farmer. 

Yet  despite  their  victimized  elements  and  high  turnover,  the 
entrepreneurial  strata  as  a  whole  persist,  and,  in  certain  phases 
of  the  economic  cycle,  some  members  do  well  enough.  Most, 
however,  no  longer  fulfil  the  entrepreneurial  function;  they  are 
no  longer  independent  operators.  The  character  of  their  decline 
in  this  respect  has  primarily  to  do  with  the  changed  nature  of 
competition  in  the  twentieth-century  economic  order.  Their  eco- 
nomic anxieties  have  led  many  small  entrepreneurs  to  a  some- 
what indignant  search  for  some  political  means  of  security,  and 
there  have  been  many  spokesmen  to  take  up  the  search  for  them. 


3 


The  Rhetoric  of  Competition 


As  an  economic  fact,  the  old  independent  entrepreneur  lives  on 
a  small  island  in  a  big  new  world;  yet,  as  an  ideological  figment 
and  a  political  force  he  has  persisted  as  if  he  inhabited  an  entire 
continent.  He  has  become  the  man  through  whom  the  ideology 
of  Utopian  capitalism  is  still  attractively  presented  to  many  of 
our  contemporaries.  Over  the  last  hundred  years,  the  United 
States  has  been  transformed  from  a  nation  of  small  capitalists 
into  a  nation  of  hired  employees;  but  the  ideology  suitable  for 
the  nation  of  small  capitalists  persists,  as  if  that  small-propertied 
world  were  still  a  going  concern.  It  has  become  the  grab-bag  of 
defenders  and  apologists,  and  so  little  is  it  challenged  that  in  the 
minds  of  many  it  seems  the  very  latest  model  of  reality. 

Nostalgia  for  the  rural  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur  now  so 
effectively  hides  the  mechanics  of  industry  that  the  farmer,  the 
custodian  of  national  life,  is  able  to  pursue  his  cash  interests  to 
the  point  of  defying  the  head  of  the  government  in  time  of  war. 
And  while  the  small  urban  entrepreneur,  as  an  examplar  of  the 
competitive  way,  suffers  exhaustion,  the  oflBcials  of  American 
opinion  find  more  and  more  reason  to  proclaim  his  virtues.  *We 
realize  .  .  .'  Senator  James  Murray  has  said,  'that  small  business 
constitutes  the  very  essence  of  free  enterprise  and  that  its  preser- 
vation is  fundamental  to  the  American  idea.'  The  logic  of  the 
small  entrepreneurs  is  not  the  logic  of  our  time;  yet  if  the  old 
middle  classes  have  been  transformed  into  often  scared  and 
always  baflBed  defenders,  they  have  not  died  easily;  they  persist 

34 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  35 

energetically,  even  if  their  energies  sometimes  seem  to  be  those 
of  cornered  men. 

Not  the  urgencies  of  democracy's  problems,  but  the  peculiar 
structure  of  American  political  representation;  not  the  efficiency 
of  small-scale  enterprise,  but  the  usefulness  of  its  image  to  the 
political  interests  of  larger  business;  not  the  swift  rise  of  the  huge 
city,  but  the  myopia  induced  by  small-town  life  of  fifty  years 
ago— these  have  kept  alive  the  senator's  fetish  of  the  American 
entrepreneur. 

1.  The  Competitive  Way  of  Life 

Official  proclamations  of  the  competitive  ways  of  small  entre- 
preneurs now  labor  under  an  enormous  burden  of  fact  which 
demonstrates  in  detail  the  accuracy  of  Thorstein  Veblen's  analysis. 
Competition,  he  held,  is  by  no  means  dead,  but  it  is  chiefly  'com- 
petition between  the  business  concerns  that  control  production, 
on  the  one  side,  and  the  consuming  public  on  the  other  side;  the 
chief  expedients  in  this  businesslike  competition  being  salesman- 
ship and  sabotage.'  Competition  has  been  curtailed  by  larger 
corporations;  it  has  also  been  sabotaged  by  groups  of  smaller 
entrepreneurs  acting  collectively.  Both  groups  have  made  clear 
the  locus  of  the  big  competition  and  have  revealed  the  mask-like 
character  of  liberalism's  rhetoric  of  small  business  and  family 
farm. 

The  character  and  ideology  of  the  small  entrepreneurs  and  the 
facts  of  the  market  are  selling  the  idea  of  competition  short. 
These  liberal  heroes,  the  small  businessmen  and  the  farmers,  do 
not  want  to  develop  their  characters  by  free  and  open  competi- 
tion; they  do  not  believe  in  competition,  and  they  have  been  do- 
ing their  best  to  get  away  from  it. 

When  small  businessmen  are  asked  whether  they  think  free 
competition  is,  by  and  large,  a  good  thing,  they  answer,  with 
authority  and  vehemence,  'Yes,  of  course— what  do  you  mean?' 
If  they  are  then  asked,  'Here  in  this,  your  town?'  still  they  say, 
'Yes,'  but  now  they  hesitate  a  little.  Finally:  'How  about  here  in 
this  town  in  furniture?'— or  groceries,  whatever  the  man's  line  is. 
Their  answers  are  of  two  sorts:  'Yes,  if  it's  fair  competition,' 
which  turns  out  to  mean:  'if  it  doesn't  make  me  compete.'  Their 


36  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

second  answer  adds  up  to  the  same  competition  with  the  public: 
'Well,  you  see,  in  certain  lines,  it's  no  good  if  there  are  too  many 
businesses.  You  ought  to  keep  the  other  fellow's  business  in  mind.' 
The  small  businessman,  as  well  as  the  farmer,  wants  to  become 
big,  not  directly  by  eating  up  others  like  himself  in  competition, 
but  by  the  indirect  ways  and  means  practiced  by  his  own  par- 
ticular heroes— those  already  big.  In  the  dream  life  of  the  small 
entrepreneur,  the  sure  fix  is  replacing  the  open  market. 

But  if  small  men  wish  to  close  their  ranks,  why  do  they  con- 
tinue to  talk,  in  abstract  contexts,  especially  political  ones,  about 
free  competition?  The  answer  is  that  the  political  function  of 
free  competition  is  what  really  matters  now,  to  small  entre- 
preneurs, but  especially  to  big-business  spokesmen.  This  ideology 
performs  a  crucial  role  in  the  competition  between  business  on 
the  one  hand  and  the  electorate,  labor  in  particular,  on  the  other. 
It  is  a  means  of  justifying  the  social  and  economic  position  of 
business  in  the  community  at  large.  For,  if  there  is  free  competi- 
tion and  a  constant  coming  and  going  of  enterprises,  the  one  who 
remains  established  is  'the  better  man'  and  'deserves  to  be  where 
he  is.'  But  if  instead  of  such  competition,  there  is  a  rigid  line  be- 
tween successful  entrepreneurs  and  the  employee  community, 
the  man  on  top  may  be  'coasting  on  what  his  father  did,'  and  not 
really  be  worthy  of  his  hard-won  position.  Nobody  talks  more 
of  free  enterprise  and  competition  and  of  the  best  man  winning 
than  the  man  who  inherited  his  father's  store  or  farm.  Thus  the 
principle  of  the  self-made  man,  and  the  justification  of  his  su- 
perior position  by  the  competitive  fire  through  which  he  has 
come,  require  and  in  turn  support  the  ideology  of  free  competi- 
tion. In  the  abstract  poUtical  ranges,  everyone  can  believe  in 
competition;  in  the  concrete  economic  case,  few  small  entrepre- 
neurs can  aflFord  to  do  so. 

Before  the  automobile  was  in  wide  use,  the  spread  of  the  farm- 
ing community  over  vast  distances  enabled  the  merchant  of  the 
smaller  town  to  effect  a  virtual  monopoly  over  the  small-town 
population  and  the  surrounding  farming  areas.  The  competition 
between  businessman  and  farmer  was  thus  arranged  by  geog- 
raphy and  settlement  in  favor  of  the  small-town  businessman. 
'The  nearest  thing  we  have  ever  had  to  monopoly  in  grocery 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  37 

retailing,'  remarks  one  T.N.E.C.*  economist,  *.  .  .  was  the  old 
village  grocery  store.  The  prices  which  it  charged  were  not  elastic 
and  usually  not  very  competitive  until  the  automobile  made 
them  so.' 

It  is  ironic  that  this  'natural'  monopoly  of  the  small-town  entre- 
preneur was  broken,  in  large  part,  by  precisely  those  agencies  of 
mass  distribution  which  small  businessmen  now  denounce  as  'un- 
fair competitors.'  The  same  forces  that  enlarged  the  market  area 
and  destroyed  the  old  local  monopoly— railroad  and  mail-order 
house,  chain  store,  automobile,  and  supermarket— now  appear  as 
the  very  octopuses  of  monopoly.  They  might  indeed  become  just 
that,  but  at  the  present  time  they  are  often  the  only  active  com- 
petitors in  the  retail  field.  In  the  end  the  choice  is  between  types 
of  monopolists. 

It  was  during  the  'thirties  that  the  small  entrepreneurs'  opinion 
of  competition  became  clear  on  a  nation-wide  scale.  When  the 
Depression  hit,  the  independent  businessmen,  like  the  farmers, 
made  their  revealing  shift  in  strategy:  in  an  attempt  to  install  a 
kept  individualism,  they  moved  the  fight  from  the  economic  into 
the  political  field. 

For  the  small  entrepreneurs  no  ideological  crash  accompanied 
the  economic  crash;  they  went  marching  on  ideologically.  But 
they  did  not  remain  isolated  economic  men  without  any  political 
front;  they  tried  to  tie  themselves  up  in  elaborate  organizational 
networks.  In  Congress  small-business  committees  clamored  for 
legislation  to  save  the  weak  backbone  of  the  national  economy. 
Their  legislative  efi^orts  have  been  directed  against  their  more 
eflBcient  competitors.  First  they  tried  to  kill  off  the  low-priced 
chain  stores  by  taxation;  then  they  tried  to  eliminate  the  alleged 
buying  advantages  of  mass  distributors;  finally  they  tried  to 
freeze  the  profits  of  all  distributors  in  order  to  protect  their  owoi 
profits  from  those  who  could  and  were  selling  goods  cheaper  to 
the  consumer. 

The  independent  retailer  has  been  at  the  head  of  the  move- 
ment for  these  adjuncts  of  free  enterprise:  in  his  fear  of  price 
competition  and  his  desire  for  security,  he  has  been  pushing  to 

•  Temporary  National  Economic  Commission. 


38  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

maintain  a  given  margin  under  the  guise  of  'fair  competition'  and 
'fair-trade'  laws.  He  now  regularly  demands  that  the  number  of 
outlets  controlled  by  chain  stores  be  drastically  limited  and  that 
production  be  divorced  from  distribution.  This  would,  of  course, 
kill  the  low  prices  charged  consumers  by  the  A&P,  which  makes 
very  small  retail  profits,  selling  almost  at  cost,  and  whose  real 
profits  come  from  manufacturing  and  packaging. 

The  retailers  in  the  small  town  need  not  foolishly  compete  with 
one  another  in  terms  of  prices;  they  may  as  well  co-operate  with 
one  another  and  thus  compete  more  effectively  with  their  mutual 
customers.  In  a  well-organized  little  city,  with  a  capable  Cham- 
ber of  Commerce,  there  is  no  reason  why  merchants  should  cut 
one  another's  throat,  especially  in  view  of  chain  stores  and  mail- 
order houses,  good  highways,  and  fast  automobiles  connecting 
smaller  towns  with  larger  cities.  Why  should  the  entrepreneur 
demand  anything  less  than  complete  security  in  the  risks  he 
takes?  Why  shouldn't  he  exercise  foresight  by  making  sure  he  is 
'in'  on  a  deal  before  it  becomes  publicly  known? 

The  competitive  spirit,  especially  when  embodied  in  an  ethic 
which  is  conceived  to  be  the  source  of  all  virtue,  abounds  only 
where  there  is  consciousness  of  unlimited  opportunity.  When- 
ever there  is  consciousness  of  scarcity,  of  a  limited,  contracting 
world,  then  competition  becomes  a  sin  against  one's  fellows. 
The  group  tries  to  close  its  ranks,  as  in  labor  unions,  to  set 
up  rules  for  insiders  and  rules  against  those  who  are  closed 
out.  This  is  what  the  small  entrepreneur  is  in  the  process  of  doing. 
No  longer  filled  with  a  consciousness  of  abundance,  if  he  ever 
was,  he  now  lives  in  a  world  of  limited  or  scarce  opportunities, 
and  other  people  are  seen  as  a  competitive  menace  or  as  men  to 
join  up  with. 

Under  the  threat  of  'ruinous  competition,'  laws  are  on  the 
books  of  many  states  and  cities  legalizing  the  ruin  of  competition. 
Price-maintained  items  do  sell  for  higher  prices  after  the  passage 
of  such  laws;  and  prices  are  higher  for  cities  where  the  main- 
tenance is  legal  than  in  cities  where  it  is  not.  Such  laws  extend 
into  small-enterprise  fields  the  administered  price  that  the  large 
manufacturing  corporations  are  able  to  fix  among  themselves. 
The  small  entrepreneur  is  thus  only  trying  to  have  his  govern- 
ment help  him  achieve  what  big  business  and  big  farmers  have 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  39 

achieved  before  him.  And  the  business  world,  a  closed-in  com- 
munity of  men  with  a  consciousness  of  scarcity,  is  thus  more  co- 
operatively solidified. 

The  wholesaler,  given  his  frequent  dependence  upon  the  good 
will  of  the  independent  merchant,  strings  along  on  resale  price 
maintenance.  He  too  would  avoid  'competitive  price  cutting'  in 
order  to  assure  his  profit  margin.  The  manufacturer  of  trade- 
marked  goods  also  likes  it;  like  other  people  in  the  world  of 
business,  he  has  no  love  of  low  prices.  Once  'destructive  compe- 
tition' begins,  it  will  spread  between  manufacturers  and  distribu- 
tors who  will  want  higher  margins  and  lower  prices  from  manu- 
facturers; also,  the  manufacturer  needs  the  good  will  of  the  re- 
tailers so  they  will  push  his  lines  or  brands,  and  finally  the  manu- 
facturer spends  money  on  advertising;  and  price  cutting  (com- 
petition) of  any  kind  substitutes  lower  prices  for  the  higher  costs 
of  advertising.  National  advertising  and  resale  price  maintenance 
thus  supplement  each  other,  and  together  further  the  competition 
between  business  and  the  consumer. 

Today  many  small  entrepreneurs  are  in  no  way  competitive 
units  steering  independent  courses  in  an  open  market;  they  are 
not  centers  of  initiative  or  places  of  economic  innovation;  they 
operate  within  market  channels  and  a  tangled  pile-up  of  restric- 
tive legislation  and  trade  practices  firmly  laid  out  by  big  business 
and  firmly  upheld  by  small  business.  The  small  entrepreneur 
tenders  his  ideological  gifts  to  big  business  in  return  for  a  feudal- 
like  protection.  In  the  meantime,  the  fight  between  the  two  over 
the  domain  of  the  market  goes  on,  although  it  increasingly  be- 
comes a  fight  between  political  spokesmen,  who  desire  to  exploit 
anxieties  under  the  banner  of  free  competition,  and  larger  capi- 
talists, who  desire  to  rationalize  the  economics  of  distribution 
under  the  same  banner. 

In  continuing  to  see  competition  as  salvation  from  complicated 
trouble,  the  senators  naturally  fall  into  the  small  proprietor's  old 
complaints;  and  the  experts,  perhaps  for  the  record,  fall  in  with 
the  senators.  From  time  to  time  they  propose  that  the  old  captain 
of  industry  be  given  a  rebirth  with  full  benefit  of  governmental 
midwifery.  Such  proposals  are  the  best  that  official  liberals  have 
to  say  about  the  economic  facts  of  life.  Their  mood  ought  to  be 
the  mood  of  plight,  but  they  have  succeeded  in  setting  up  a 


40  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

bright  image  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  who  could  be  rehabili- 
tated as  the  hero  of  their  imagined  system,  if  only  competition 
were  once  more  to  prevail. 

2.  The  Independent  Farmer 

In  making  its  terms  with  corporate  business,  farm  entrepre- 
neurship  is  in  part  becoming  more  like  business  management, 
and  in  part  meeting  its  problems  with  the  help  and  support  of 
political  power.  All  interests  have  come  to  look  to  government, 
but  the  independent  farmer  has,  in  some  respects,  succeeded 
more  than  others  in  turning  the  federal  establishment  into  a 
public  means  for  his  private  economic  ends.  The  world  of  the 
farmer,  especially  its  upper  third,  is  now  intricately  related  to 
the  world  of  big  government,  forming  with  it  a  combination  of 
private  and  public  enterprise  wherein  private  gains  are  insured 
and  propped  by  public  funds.  The  independent  farmer  has  be- 
come politically  dependent;  he  no  longer  belongs  to  a  world  of 
straightforward  economic  fact. 

From  on  top,  farming  has  recently  been  a  good  business  propo- 
sition. Among  the  upper  farm  strata  are  included  canners  and 
packers  and  other  processors  and  distributors,  as  well  as  those 
who  look  on  the  land  as  an  investment  only.  For  while  the  top- 
level  farmers  do  buy  more  land  during  prosperity,  business  in- 
terests buy  land  and  move  into  farm  profits  in  other  ways,  during 
slumps  as  well  as  booms.  Despite  the  great  increase  in  produc- 
tivity, the  rapid  increase  in  population,  the  vast  expansion  in 
demand  for  farm  products,  the  free  land  available  for  home- 
steading— despite  all  this,  the  proportion  of  the  rural  real-estate 
owned  by  working  farmers  has  declined  for  over  half  a  century. 

CentraHzation  has  brought  consolidated  farming  and  farm 
chains,  run  like  corporate  units  by  central  management.  In  1938, 
one  insurance  company  alone  owned  enough  acreage  to  make  a 
mile-wide  farm  from  New  York  to  Los  Angeles.  Industrial  and 
financial  interests  that  have  invested  in  farm  properties  are  active 
agents  for  rational  methods  of  production  and  management. 
They  have  the  money  to  buy  the  machines  and  employ  the  en- 
gineers. Even  where  they  do  not  invest,  own,  or  manage  directly, 
they  take  over  processing  and  marketing.  By  the  middle  'thirties, 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  41 

five  tobacco  companies  bought  over  half  the  total  crop;  four  meat 
packers  processed  two-thirds  of  all  meat  animals  slaughtered; 
thirteen  flour  mills  processed  65  per  cent  of  all  the  wheat  mar- 
keted. 

Thus  the  farmer  must  deal  with  the  business  interests  closing 
in  on  the  processing  and  the  distributing  of  his  product.  He  must 
also  deal  with  those  who  sell  him  what  he  needs:  he  must  buy 
most  of  his  farm  implements  from  one  of  the  four  industrial  firms 
which  in  1936  sold  more  than  three-fourths  of  all  important  farm 
implements.  His  only  recourse  has  been  to  keep  prices  as  high 
as  the  traffic  will  bear.  And  he  has  attempted  to  do  so  by  replac- 
ing the  dictates  of  the  free  market  by  the  edicts  of  political  pol- 
icy, to  suspend  the  laws  of  supply  and  demand  so  as  to  guarantee 
a  stable  market  and  price  bottoms.  Only  in  so  far  as  he  was  able 
to  create  an  effective  collusive  control  of  the  market  by  political 
tactics  could  the  farmer  hope  to  deal  with  modem  business  and 
with  modern  life  on  something  like  an  equal  footing. 

In  subsidizing  free  private  enterprise,  the  New  Deal  paid  spe- 
cial attention  to  the  old  rural  middle  class.  In  brief,  the  New 
Deal  farm  program  attempted  to  transfer  to  the  farm  sector  of 
the  economy  the  well-known  practices  of  the  industrial  sector;  it 
taught  the  farmer  the  value  of  producing  less  in  order  not  to 
break  prevailing  prices.  To  protect  this  'race  of  free  men  in  the 
open  country'  from  the  evils  of  free  competition,  it  paid  them 
subsidies  or  benefits  to  curtail  their  production.  The  Federal  Gov- 
ernment, one  might  say,  became  the  farmer's  executive  com- 
mittee. 

Since  the  'thirties,  the  government  has  tried  to  curtail  produc- 
tion by  paying  benefits  to  farmers  who  raised  less;  it  has  bought 
up  'surplus'  farm  produce  which  threatened  to  break  prices; 
it  has  paid  direct  subsidies  in  order  to  make  up  differences  be- 
tween market  prices  and  estabHshed  price  minimums.  And  in  the 
spring  of  1949  it  was  proposed  by  the  Secretary  of  Agriculture 
that,  instead  of  keeping  the  prices  of  specific  crops  at  parity, 
based  on  a  previous  'good  period,'  the  government  should  sup- 
port the  farmers'  gross  cash  income  in  relation  to  total  national 
income.  It  would  work  out  in  such  a  way  as  to  guarantee  the 
farmer  an  annual  income  comparable  to  his  yearly  income  over 
the  past  ten  boom  years. 


42  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

The  latter-day  history  of  the  independent  farmer  is  thus  not 
a  struggle  of  free  producers  loosely  tied  together  by  an  imper- 
sonal market;  it  is  a  history  of  various  attempts  made  by  politi- 
cians and  civil  servants  to  raise  and  maintain  agricultural  prices. 
Failing  in  this,  the  farmers'  political  agents  have  arranged  to 
compensate  out  of  public  funds  the  independent  enterpriser  who 
has  become  the  victim  of  the  free  market. 

The  eflPectiveness  of  such  measures,  accompanied  by  war-time 
expansion,  is  amply  attested.  During  World  War  II,  land  val- 
ues went  up  more  than  during  the  First  World  War.  Total 
farm  income  and  cash  receipts  from  crops  in  1946  were  five  times 
higher  than  in  1932.  The  per-capita  income  of  the  farmers  was 
almost  tripled.  By  1945,  well  over  half  of  all  farm  operators  were 
full  owners  of  the  land  they  worked  and  the  proportion  of  farm 
tenants  had  dropped  to  about  one-third;  mortgage  debt  as  a 
percentage  of  total  farm  value  had  declined  from  23  per  cent  in 
1935  to  about  12  per  cent. 

Urban  people  helped  pay  for  this  rural  prosperity,  not  only  in 
taxes  but  directly  in  food  costs,  which  make  up  about  40  per  cent 
of  the  average  family  budget.  In  1940,  the  budgeted  cost  of  pub- 
lic money  paid  to  agriculturists  was  about  one-tenth  of  the  na- 
tion's food  bill.  Given  the  lack  of  adequate  price  control,  the  war- 
born  widening  of  markets  acted  during  the  'forties  to  keep  most 
farm  prices  well  above  government-supported  levels.  Just  as  the 
contraction  of  the  foreign  markets  contributed  to  the  farmer's 
collapse  in  the  'twenties,  so  in  the  'forties  its  expansion  aided  in 
the  farmer's  rehabilitation.  Between  the  middle  'thirties  and  the 
middle  'forties  the  average  value  of  agricultural  exports  rose  more 
than  threefold.  But  this  was  a  different  kind  of  'foreign  market'; 
born  of  war,  it  was  run,  regulated,  and  price-controlled  by  a  pro- 
farmer  government.  The  domestic  market  also,  after  seven  lean 
years  of  mass  unemployment,  was  fattened  by  the  war  economy. 

The  farmer  has  been  able  to  get  governmental  largesse  because 
he  enjoys  three  distinct  political  advantages.  First,  within  the 
constitutional  system  the  farmer  is  over-represented.  By  virtue 
of  the  geographical  shape  of  the  Senate,  territorial  rather  than 
demographic,  the  farm  bloc  is  one  of  the  most  powerful  bodies 
in  the  formal  government.  New  York's  millions  of  employees  and 
Nebraska's  thousands  of  farmers  each  have  two  senators.  Sec- 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  43 

ond,  beginning  in  the  early  'twenties,  the  farmer  has  built  a  set 
of  pressure  groups  that  has  become  perhaps  the  strongest  single 
bloc  in  Washington;  the  American  Farm  Bureau  is  knit  into  the 
very  structure  of  the  governmental  system.  It  speaks  frankly  not 
of  'one  man  alone  individualism'  but  of  'powerful  organized 
groups  competing  for  economic  advantage.'  Third,  the  farmer 
has  enjoyed  an  unusual  degree  of  public  moral  support. 

The  farmers  who  are  benefited  by  propped-up  prices  are  more 
likely  to  be  of  the  upper  third  who  sell  so  much  than  the  middle 
or  lower  third  who  sell  so  little.  Even  in  the  boom,  the  long-term 
trends  of  concentration  remain  evident.  It  is  a  narrowed  upper 
stratum  of  businesslike,  politically  alert  farmers  who  are  flourish- 
ing, not  a  world  of  small  entrepreneurs.  And  in  this  boom,  based 
on  political  prices  and  increased  productivity,  the  old  forces,  as 
well  as  many  new  ones,  are  still  at  work.  And  there  is  still  the 
old  contradiction:  who  will  buy  the  flood  of  goods  that  the  motors 
of  technology  are  turning  out?  By  the  fall  of  1948  agricultural 
planning  was  beginning  to  raise  all  the  questions  that  beset  it  in 
the  'thirties.  The  Secretary  of  Commerce  called  for  huge  ex- 
ports; the  farm  lobby  and  its  Department  of  Agriculture  called 
for  more.  'What  the  Europeans  thought  and  what  they  wanted 
was  something  else  again,'  wrote  the  editors  of  Fortune.  'It  is  a 
little  silly  ...  to  preach  the  free  market  in  one  breath  and  in 
the  next  propound  what  amounts  to  a  cartel  system  in  agricul- 
ture.' 

Farming  may  be  seen  (1)  as  a  way  of  livelihood  determining 
the  life  of  its  worker-owner;  (2)  as  a  real-estate  investment  from 
which  owners,  with  the  aid  of  others'  work  and  political  help, 
derive  profit;  or  (3)  in  the  efiicient  eyes  of  the  state  in  a  period 
of  permanent  war  economy,  as  a  natural  resource  and  a  piece  of 
equipment  that  must  be  geared  to  the  national  usage. 

Each  of  these  three  views  entails  different  images  of  the 
farmer:  land  as  livelihood  means  'the  farmer'  as  unalienated 
entrepreneur;  land  as  productive  real  estate  means  'the  farmer' 
as  big  investor  financially  exploiting  the  landless  worker;  and 
there  is  this  third  image,  which  may  be  that  of  the  future:  land 
as  equipment,  and  'the  farmer'  as  a  salaried  expert.  Today  the 


44  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

American  land  is  seen  in  all  three  ways,  and  there  are,  in  fact, 
all  three  types  of  'farmers.' 

In  the  rhetoric  of  many  farm  spokesmen,  farming  as  a  business 
is  disguised  as  farming  as  a  way  of  life.  The  Second  World  War 
and  its  economic  consequences  saved  the  poUtically  dependent 
farmer;  the  era  of  militarized  economies  may  ruin  him.  The  norm 
of  rational  efficiency,  uppermost  in  war,  is  clearly  violated  by  the 
system  of  present-day  agriculture.  Mihtary  and  technological 
needs  may  take  ascendance  over  economic  greed  and  political 
fixing.  Alongside  the  small  independent  farmer,  a  new  breed  of 
men  might  come  onto  the  land,  men  who  never  were  owners  and 
do  not  expect  to  be,  men  who,  like  factory  employees,  manage 
and  work  the  big  machines.  Then  farming  would  take  its  place, 
not  as  the  center  of  a  social  world  as  formerly,  nor  as  a  politically 
secured  heirloom  of  free  enterprise,  but  as  one  national  industry 
among  other  intricate,  rationalized  departments  of  production. 

In  the  meantime,  farming  is  less  a  morally  ascendant  way  of 
life  than  an  industry;  appreciation  of  the  family  farm  as  a  special 
virtue-producing  unit  in  a  world  of  free  men  is  today  but  a  nos- 
talgic mood  among  deluded  metropolitan  people.  Moreover,  it 
is  an  ideological  veil  for  larger  business  layouts  whose  economic 
ally  and  ultimate  victim  the  politically  dependent  farmer  may 
well  become. 

3.  The  Small  Business  Front 

Images  of  small  men  usually  arise  and  persist  widely  only  be- 
cause big  men  find  good  use  for  them.  Businessmen  had  not  been 
taken  as  exemplars  of  the  small  individual,  as  were  farmers,  until 
in  the  twentieth  century  the  small  businessman  arose  as  a  coun- 
ter-image to  the  big  businessman.  Then  big  business  began  to 
promulgate  and  use  the  image  of  the  small  businessman.  Such 
spokesmen  have  been  gravely  concerned  about  the  fate  of  small 
business  because,  in  their  rhetoric,  small  business  is  the  last 
urban  representative  of  free  competition  and  thus  of  the  com- 
petitive virtues  of  the  private  enterprise  system. 

In  any  well-conducted  Senate  hearing  on  economic  issues, 
someone  always  says  that  the  small  entrepreneur  is  the  backbone 
of  the  American  economy,  that  he  maintains  the  thousands  of 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  45 

smaller  cities,  and  that,  especially  in  these  cities,  he  is  the  very 
flower  of  the  American  way.  'It  is  the  small  businessman  who 
has  become  so  closely  identified  with  the  many  hundreds  of  vil- 
lages and  cities  of  this  land  that  he  is  the  very  foundation  of  the 
hometown's  growth  and  development.'  Perhaps  giant  monopolies 
do  exist,  the  image  runs,  but,  after  all,  they  are  of  the  big  city; 
it  is  in  the  small  towns,  the  locus  of  real  Americans,  that  the 
small  businessman  thrives. 

Quite  apart  from  the  larger  interests  the  small-town  small- 
liusiness  stratum  serves  and  the  nostalgia  its  existence  taps,  there 
is  a  solid  reason  why  people  hold  so  firmly  to  its  image.  In  these 
towns  the  old  urban  middle  class  has  been  the  historic  carrier 
of  what  is  called  civic  spirit,  which  in  the  American  town  has 
involved  a  widespread  participation  in  local  affairs  on  the  part 
of  those  able  to  benefit  a  community  by  voluntary  management 
of  its  public  enterprises.  These  enterprises  range  from  having  the 
streets  properly  cleaned  to  improving  the  parks;  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  they  often  seem  to  have  something  to  do  with  real  estate, 
in  one  way  or  another.  The  history  of  the  civic  spirit  reveals  that 
for  the  old  middle  class,  especially  the  small  merchants,  it  has 
meant  a  businesslike  participation  in  civic  matters. 

For  this  role,  the  old  middle-class  individual  was  well  fitted: 
he  often  had  the  necessary  time  and  money;  his  success  in  his 
small  business  has,  according  to  the  prevailing  idea,  trained  him 
for  initiative  and  responsibility;  he  has  been  thrown  into  fairly 
continual  contact  with  the  administrative  and  political  figures 
of  the  city;  and,  of  course,  he  has  often  stood  to  benefit  economi- 
cally from  civic  endeavor  and  improvement.  'It  is  just  good  busi- 
ness to  be  somebody  civically,'  said  a  prosperous  merchant,  who 
was. 

Yet  economic  self-interest  has  not  been  the  whole  motive;  civic 
participation  has  also  involved  competition  among  small  busi- 
nessmen for  prestige.  They  compete  economically  as  business- 
men, they  compete  civically  as  democratic  citizens.  Because  of 
their  local  economic  roots,  they  are  truly  local  men;  they  wish 
to  win  standing  in  their  city.  If  some  are  bigger  businessmen 
than  others,  still  the  width  of  the  stratum  as  a  whole  is  not  so 
great  that  those  at  the  bottom  could  not  see  and  aspire  to  the  top. 


46  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

Traditionally,  the  lower  classes  have  also  participated  in  civic 
euphoria,  but  only  as  an  adjunct  of  businessmen.  They  have 
identified  themselves  with  businessmen  in  such  a  way  as  to 
feel  that  this  identification  was  with  the  town  itself.  This  under- 
side of  civic  spirit  has  been  possible,  first,  because  small  plants 
and  shops  tended  to  make  informal  the  relations  between  workers 
and  businessmen;  second,  because  the  existence  of  many  firms, 
graded  in  sizes,  made  it  possible  for  the  entrepreneurial  system 
to  extend,  at  least  psychologically,  to  the  working  class;  and 
third,  because  the  population  of  small-business  cities  has  grown 
rather  slowly  and,  compared  with  cities  subject  to  the  booms  of 
big  business  and  rapid  metropolitan  mobility,  has  been  the  result 
more  of  natural  increase  than  of  migration.  This  rate  and  type  of 
growth  have  meant  that  more  of  the  people  of  the  small  city  and 
its  adjoining  area  'grew  up  together,'  and,  in  smaller  towns,  went 
to  the  same  public  schools.  So  the  very  pattern  of  city  growth  has 
made  for  an  easier  identification  between  classes  and  therefore 
for  greater  civic  identification. 

As  the  economic  position  and  power  of  the  small  entrepreneur 
has  declined,  especially  since  the  First  World  War,  this  old  pat- 
tern of  civic  prestige,  and  hence  civic  spirit,  has  been  grievously 
modified.  In  some  smaller  cities  the  mark  of  the  big-business  way 
is  a  bolder  mark  than  in  others,  yet  in  all  of  them  the  new  order 
is  modifying  the  prestige  and  power  of  the  small-business  com- 
munity. 

The  place  of  the  small  businessman  in  the  class  pattern  of  vari- 
ous smaller  cities  differs  in  accordance  with  the  degree  and  type 
of  industrialization,  and  with  the  extent  to  which  one  or  two  big 
firms  dominate  the  city's  labor  market.  But  the  over-all  decline 
of  small-business  prestige  is  now  fairly  standard. 

At  the  top  of  the  occupational-income  ranking  are  big-business 
people  and  executives.  Next  are  small  businessmen  and  free  pro- 
fessionals, followed  by  higher  salaried  white-collar  people,  and 
then  lower  salaried  oflBce  workers  and  foremen.  At  the  bottom 
is  labor  of  all  grades.  But  no  objective  measure  of  stratification 
necessarily  coincides  with  the  social  and  civic  prestige  which 
various  members  of  these  strata  enjoy.  An  examination  of  the 
images  which  the  people  of  each  level  have  of  the  people  on  all 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  47 

Other  levels  reveals  one  major  fact:  small  business  (and  white- 
collar)  people  occupy  the  most  ambiguous  social  positions.  It  is 
as  if  the  city's  population  were  polarized  into  two  groups,  big 
business  and  labor,  and  everyone  else  were  thrown  together  into 
a  vague  'middle  class.' 

Wage-workers,  to  whom  small  businessmen  are  often  the  most 
visible  element  of  the  'higher-ups,'  do  not  readily  distinguish 
between  small  business  and  the  upper  class  in  general.  Wage- 
worker  families  ascribe  prestige  and  power  to  the  small  business- 
man without  really  seeing  the  position  he  holds  vis-d-vis  the 
upper  classes.  'Shopkeepers,'  says  a  lower-class  woman,  'they  go 
in  the  higher  brackets.  Because  they  are  on  the  higher  level.  They 
don't  humble  themselves  to  the  poor.' 

The  upper-class  person,  on  the  other  hand,  places  the  small 
businessman,  especially  the  retailer,  much  lower  in  the  scale 
than  he  does  the  larger  businessman,  especially  the  industrialist. 
Both  the  size  and  the  type  of  business  are  explicitly  used  as  pres- 
tige criteria  by  the  upper  classes,  among  whom  the  socially  new, 
larger,  industrial  entrepreneurs  and  their  colleagues,  the  officials 
of  absentee  corporations,  rank  small  business  rather  low  because 
of  the  local  nature  of  its  activities.  They  gauge  prestige  mainly 
by  the  economic  scope  of  a  man's  business  and  his  social  and 
business  connections  with  members  of  nationally  known  firms. 
The  old-family  rentier,  usually  rich  from  real  estate,  ranks  small 
businessmen  low  because  of  the  way  he  feels  about  their  back- 
ground and  education,  'the  way  they  live.'  Both  of  these  upper- 
class  elements  more  or  less  agree  with  the  sentiment  expressed  by 
an  old-family  banker:  'Business  ethics  are  higher,  more  broad- 
minded,  more  stable  among  industrialists,  as  over  against  retail- 
ers. We  all  know  that.' 

Small  businessmen  are  of  the  generally  upper  ranks  only  in 
income,  and  then,  usually,  only  during  boom  times;  in  terms  of 
family  origin,  intermarriage,  job  history,  and  education,  more 
of  them  than  of  any  other  higher  income  group  are  lower  class. 
In  these  respects,  a  good  proportion  of  the  small  businessmen 
have  close  biographical  connections  with  the  wage-worker  strata. 
In  the  small  city  there  is  rigidity  at  the  bottom  and  at  the  top— 
except  as  regards  small  businessmen  who,  compared  with  other 
income  groups,  have  done  a  great  deal  of  moving  up  the  line. 


48  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

These  facts  help  to  explain  the  different  images  of  small  busi- 
nessmen held  by  members  of  upper  and  of  lower  strata.  The  old 
upper  class  judges  more  by  status  and  'background';  the  lower 
class  more  by  income  and  the  appearances  to  which  it  readily 
leads. 

When  a  big  business  moves  into  a  town,  the  distribution  of 
social  prestige  and  civic  effort  changes;  as  big  business  enlarges 
its  economic  and  political  power,  it  creates  a  new  social  world 
in  its  image.  Just  as  the  labor  markets  of  the  smaller  cities  have 
been  dominated,  so  also  have  their  markets  for  prestige.  The 
chief  local  executives  of  the  corporations,  the  $10,000  to  $25,000 
a  year  men,  gain  the  top  social  positions,  displacing  the  former 
social  leaders  of  the  city.  Local  men  begin  to  realize  that  their 
social  standing  depends  upon  association  with  the  leading  offi- 
cials of  the  absentee  firms;  they  struggle  to  follow  the  officials' 
style  of  living,  to  move  into  their  suburbs,  to  be  invited  to  their 
social  affairs,  and  to  marry  their  own  children  into  these  circles. 
Those  whose  incomes  do  not  permit  full  realization  of  what  has 
happened  to  the  social  world,  or  who  refuse  to  recognize  its 
dynamic,  either  become  eccentric  dwarfs  of  the  new  status  sys- 
tem, or,  perhaps  without  recognizing  it,  begin  to  imitate  in  curi- 
ous miniature  the  new  ways  of  the  giants.  When  the  big  firm 
comes  to  the  small  city  the  wives  of  its  officialdom  become  models 
for  the  local  women  of  the  old  middle  class.  The  often  glamorous 
women  of  the  firm's  officials  come  and  go  between  the  metro- 
politan center  and  their  exclusive  suburb  of  the  small  city.  In 
the  eyes  of  the  small  businessman's  wife  who  has  Not  Been  In- 
vited one  sees  the  social  meaning  of  the  decline  of  the  old  middle 
class. 

No  matter  how  much  or  in  what  way  the  old  middle  class  re- 
sists, the  distribution  of  prestige  follows  in  due  course  the  distri- 
bution of  economic  and  political  power  in  the  city.  The  ambigu- 
ous status  of  small  business  people  in  this  new  world  of  prestige 
has  to  do  with  their  power  position  as  well  as  their  social  back- 
ground. In  the  polarization  of  the  small  city,  both  prestige  and 
power  become  concentrated  at  the  top:  the  big  business  people 
monopolize  both. 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  49 

Such  power  as  the  local  business  community  has  is  organized 
in  the  Chamber  of  Commerce,  to  which  most  small  businessmen 
belong.  Yet  everyone  in  the  town  who  is  politically  literate  feels 
that  the  larger  firms  'run  the  town.'  Many  small  businessmen  will 
say  so  in  semi-private  contexts.  'If  you  live  in  this  town/  a  drug- 
gist says,  'you  just  know  you're  working  for  [the  big  plants], 
whether  you're  working  in  their  plants  or  not.' 

One  of  the  most  powerful  weapons  the  large  corporations  pos- 
sess is  the  threat  to  leave  town;  this  veto  is  in  effect  the  power 
of  life  or  death  over  the  economic  life  of  the  town,  affecting  the 
town's  bank,  the  Chamber  of  Commerce,  small  businessmen, 
labor,  and  city  oflBcials  alike.  The  history  of  its  use  in  many 
smaller  cities  proves  how  effective  it  can  be.  To  show  their  dis- 
approval of  a  city  project,  big  corporation  ofiBcials  may  withdraw 
from  the  activities  of  the  sponsoring  organization,  absenting 
themselves  from  meetings,  or  withholding  financial  support.  But 
these  methods,  although  they  are  used  and  are  effective,  are  often 
too  direct.  Increasingly,  large  business  mobilizes  small-business- 
small-town  sentiment,  and  uses  it  as  a  front.  Where  real  power 
has  consequences  that  many  people  do  not  like,  there  is  need  for 
the  noisy  appearance  of  power  little  business  can  provide.  The 
old  middle  class  is  coming  to  serve  a  crucial  purpose,  as  a  con- 
cealing ia.ga.de,  in  the  psychology  of  civic  prestige.  'They  don't 
want  it  to  appear  that  they  control  things,'  an  assistant  manager 
of  a  Chamber  of  Commerce  said.  Nevertheless,  'they'  do. 

This  use  of  small  businessmen  in  big  business  towns  can 
paralyze  the  civic  will  of  the  middle  classes  and  confuse  their 
efforts.  Small  business  is  out  in  front,  busily  accomplishing  all 
sorts  of  minor  civic  projects,  taking  praise— and  blame— from  the 
rank-and-file  citizenry.  Among  those  in  the  lower  classes  who  for 
one  reason  or  another  are  anti-business,  the  small  businessmen 
are  often  the  target  of  aggression  and  blame;  but  from  the  lower- 
class  individual  who  is  pro-business  or  neutral,  the  small  busi- 
nessmen get  high  esteem  because  'they  are  doing  a  lot  for  this 
city.' 

The  prestige  often  imputed  to  small  businessmen  by  lower- 
class  members  is  based  largely  on  ascribed  power,  but  neither 
this  prestige  nor  this  power  is  always  claimed,  and  certainly  it 
is  not  often  cashed  in  among  the  upper  classes.  The  upper-class 


50  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

businessman  knows  the  actual  power  set-up;  but  if  he  or  his 
cHque  is  using  small  businessmen  for  some  project,  he  may 
shower  them  with  public  prestige  although  he  does  not  accept 
them  or  allow  them  more  power  than  he  can  retain  in  his  in- 
direct control. 

The  political  and  economic  composition  of  a  well-run  Cham- 
ber of  Commerce  enables  it  to  borrow  the  prestige  and  power 
of  the  top  strata;  its  committees  include  the  'leaders'  of  prac- 
tically every  voluntary  association,  including  labor  unions; 
within  its  organizations  and  through  its  contacts,  it  is  able  vir- 
tually to  monopolize  the  organization  and  publicity  talent  of 
the  city.  Thus  identifying  its  program  with  the  unifying  myth 
of  the  'community  interest,'  big  business,  even  in  the  home 
town,  often  toys  with  little  business  as  a  wilful  courtesan  treats 
an  elderly  adorer. 

Yet  the  small  businessman,  in  small  city  and  in  metropolitan 
area,  cHngs  stubbornly  to  the  identity,  'business  is  business,' 
and  his  ideology  rests  upon  his  identification  with  business  as 
such.  The  benefits  derived  from  good  relations  with  higher-ups, 
and  the  prestige-striving  oriented  toward  the  big  men,  tend  to 
strengthen  this  identification;  and  this  identification  is  ener- 
getically organized  and  actively  promoted  by  the  very  organi- 
zations formed  and  supported  by  small  businessmen, 

A  knowing  business  journal  writes  about  the  Fair  Deal's  woo- 
ing of  small  business:  'You  can  be  pretty  flexible  in  defining  a 
"small  business."  Everyone  outside  the  Big  Three  or  Big  Four 
you  find  at  the  top  of  most  industries  is  small  in  Truman's  eyes. 
And  in  the  name  of  Small  Business,  you  can  do  things  to  direct 
and  stimulate  the  economy  that  would  be  politically  diflBcult 
under  any  other  label.' 

Actually,  small  business  is  by  no  means  unified  in  its  outlook, 
nor  agreed  upon  what  it  wants,  as  is  evidenced  by  the  disunity 
and  weakness  of  the  small-business  national-trade  associations. 
There  are  many  such  organizations  but  the  largest  probably 
has  less  than  5000  members;  each  is  tied  primarily  to  one  line 
of  business,  which  usually  includes  large  as  well  as  small  firms. 
The  small  businessman  sees  first  of  all  the  conditions  of  his  own 
industry  in  his  local  market,  although  the  problem  he  has  in 
common  with  all  other  small  businessmen  arises  from  the  con- 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  51 

centration  process;  to  see  that  process  for  what  it  is  requires  an 
act  of  abstraction  of  which  any  significant  number  of  small 
businessmen  seem  incapable. 

The  small-business  wing  of  the  old  middle  class  stands  in  con- 
trast to  the  farmer  wing,  whose  political  force  is  being  used 
nationally  and  with  great  success.  Nationally,  the  small  busi- 
nessman is  overpowered,  politically  and  economically,  by  big 
business;  he  therefore  tries  to  ride  with  and  benefit  from  the 
success  of  big  business  on  the  national  political  front,  even  as 
he  fights  the  economic  effects  of  big  business  on  the  local  and 
state  front.  The  local  businessman  is  usually  against  only  the 
unfair  chain  and  the  monster  department  store,  and  does  not  see 
the  national  movement.  This  is  understandable:  some  70  per  cent 
of  small  businessmen  are  retail  tradesmen;  while  they  cannot  see 
the  big  manufacturer  so  clearly,  any  new  channel  of  distribution 
is  right  before  their  eyes,  and  evokes  their  resentment  because 
they  can  immediately  feel  its  competition. 

There  is  reason  in  the  small  businessman's  point  that  business, 
large  or  small,  when  contrasted  with  the  consuming  public,  is 
after  all  business.  The  problem  of  small  business  is,  in  the  end,  a 
family  quarrel,  a  quarrel  between  the  big  and  the  small  capi- 
talist over  the  distribution  of  available  profits.  The  small  capital- 
ist desires  profits  to  be  more  'equally'  divided  within  the  'business 
community'— that  is  what  the  restoration  of  free  private  compe- 
tition means  to  him.  Yet,  at  the  same  time  that  small  firms  are 
being  driven  to  the  wall,  they  are  being  used  by  the  big  firms 
with  whom  they  publicly  identify  themselves.  This  fact  under- 
lies the  ideology  and  the  frustration  of  the  small  urban  capitalist; 
it  is  the  reason  why  his  aggression  is  directed  at  labor  and  gov- 
ernment. 

Being  closer  to  labor  by  social  origin  and  business  contact, 
small  businessmen  can  the  more  easily  magnify  and  develop  re- 
sentments against  labor's  power.  Being  closer  to  them  on  eco- 
nomic levels,  they  are  quick  to  observe  any  shifts  in  their  rela- 
tive economic  positions.  As  an  employer  of  labor  the  small  busi- 
ness stratum,  Rudolf  Hilferding  wrote  in  1910,  comes  into  'more 
acute  contradiction  to  the  working  class.  .  .'  If  the  power  of 
unions  is  not  greater  in  small  enterprises,  still  the  exercise  of  that 


52  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

power  seems  more  drastic;  the  small  concern  is  less  able  than  the 
large  one  to  meet  both  the  higher  wages  the  union  wins  for  its 
members  and  the  costs  of  social  security  labor  obtains  from  the 
state  welfare  coffers.  As  labor  unions  have  organized  and  devel- 
oped their  political  pressure,  especially  over  the  last  fifteen  years, 
and  as  wages  went  up  during  World  War  II,  the  small  business- 
man readily  developed  a  deep  resentment,  which  fed  his  anti- 
labor  ideology.  He  always  says  the  working  man  is  a  fine  fellow, 
but  these  unions  are  bad,  and  their  leaders  are  still  worse. 

His  attitude  toward  'labor'  magnifies  its  power,  and  his  resent- 
ment takes  a  personal  form:  'Think  of  the  tremendous  wages  be- 
ing paid  to  laboring  men  ...  all  out  of  proportion  to  what  they' 
should  be  paid  ...  a  number  of  them  have  spoken  to  me,  say- 
ing they  are  ashamed  to  be  taking  the  wages.'  And  another  one 
says:  'I  had  a  young  man  cash  a  check  at  the  store  on  Monday 
evening  for  $95.00.  .  .  We  would  not  class  him  as  half  as  good 
as  our  clerks  in  our  store.  .  .' 

It  is  this  feeling  that  makes  it  possible  for  big  business  to  use 
small  business  as  a  shield.  In  any  melee  between  big  business 
and  big  labor,  the  small  entrepreneurs  seem  to  be  more  often 
on  the  side  of  business.  It  is  as  if  the  closer  to  bankruptcy  they 
are,  the  more  frantically  they  cling  to  their  ideal.  But  much  as 
they  cling  to  big  business,  they  do  not  look  to  it  as  the  solver  of 
their  troubles;  for  this,  strangely  enough,  they  look  to  govern- 
ment. The  little  businessman  believes,  'We  are  victims  of  circum- 
stances. My  only  hope  is  in  Senator  Murray,  who,  I  feel  sure, 
will  do  all  in  his  power  to  keep  the  little  businessman  who,  he 
knows,  has  been  the  foundation  of  the  country  [etc.].  .  .  We  all 
know  no  business  can  survive  selling  ...  at  a  loss,  which  is  my 
case  today,  on  the  new  cost  of  green  coffee.' 

Yet,  while  he  looks  to  government  for  economic  aid  and  po- 
litical comfort,  the  independent  businessman  is,  at  the  same  time, 
resentful  of  its  regulations  and  taxation,  and  he  has  vague  feel- 
ings that  larger  powers  are  using  government  against  him.  And 
his  attitude  toward  government  is  blended  with  estimates  of  his 
own  virtue,  for  the  criterion  of  man  is  success  on  Main  Street: 
'Another  thing  that  I  resent  very  much  is  the  fact  that  most  of 
these  organizations  are  headed  by  men  who  are  not  able  to  make 
a  success  in  private  life  and  have  squeezed  into  WPA  [sic]  and 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  53 

gotten  over  us  and  are  telling  us  what  to  do,  and  it  is  to  me 
very  resentful.  And  all  these  men  here  know  of  people  who  head 
these  organizations,  who  were  not  able  to  make  a  living  on  Main 
Street  before/ 

Small  business's  attitude  toward  government,  as  toward  labor, 
plays  into  the  hands  of  big-business  ideology.  In  both  connec- 
tions, small  businessmen  are  shock  troops  in  the  battle  against 
labor  unions  and  government  controls. 

Big  government,  organized  labor,  big  business,  as  well  as  im- 
mediate competitors,  prepare  the  soil  of  anxiety  for  small  busi- 
ness; the  ideological  growth  of  this  anxiety  is  thus  deeply  rooted 
in  fears,  which,  though  often  misplaced,  are  not  without  founda- 
tion. Big  business  exploits  in  its  own  interests  the  very  anxieties 
it  has  created  for  small  business. 

Many  of  the  problems  to  which  Nazism  provided  one  kind  of 
solution  have  by  no  means  been  solved  in  America.  'The  ultimate 
success  of  national  socialism,'  A.  R.  L.  Gurland,  O.  Kirchheimer, 
and  F.  Neumann  have  recalled,  'was  due  to  a  large  extent  to  its 
ability  to  use  the  frustrations  of  [small-business]  groups  for  its 
own  purposes.  Small  business  wanted  to  retain  its  independence 
and  have  an  adequate  income.  But  it  was  not  allowed  to  do  this. 
The  Nazis  directed  the  resentment  of  small  businessmen  against 
labor  and  against  the  Weimar  Republic,  which  appeared  to  be, 
and  to  some  extent  was,  the  creation  of  the  German  labor  move- 
ment .  .  .  the  frustrations  of  small  businessmen,  created  pri- 
marily by  the  process  of  concentration,  were  not  directed  against 
the  industrial  and  financial  monopolists,  but  against  those  groups 
that  appeared  to  have  attained  more  security  at  the  expense  of 
small  business.  .  .  Thus,  national  socialism  was  able  to  organize 
small  business  by  promising  it  the  coming  of  a  Golden  Age.  .  . 
While  victimized  by  the  Government's  tax  policy  and  trade  re- 
strictions, small  business  was  mortally  hit  by  the  spread  of  infla- 
tion which  devoured  its  economies.  This  from  the  very  beginning 
determined  the  political  orientation  which  small  business  was  to 
follow  under  the  Republic.  Assistance  was  expected  from  those 
parties  which  seemed  able  to  resist  labor  and  labor-influenced 
Government.'  Policies  that  emphasized  the  middle-class  aim  of 
maintaining  the  status  quo  between  the  balance  of  social  forces 
and  promised  legal  measures  to  further  and  protect  independent 


54  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

middle-class  elements  were  welcomed  by  these  elements.  'Small- 
business  leaders  did  not  mistrust  the  Nazi  party.  Did  not  many 
of  the  Nazi  leaders  come  from  the  very  social  stratum  to  which 
they,  the  small  businessmen,  belonged?  Had  not  many  joined  the 
party  for  the  very  reasons  which  had  made  life  under  the  Re- 
public unbearable  for  small  businessmen?' 

If  the  small  businessman  in  America  is  going  back  on  his 
spokesmen,  he  cannot  really  be  blamed,  for  the  spokesmen,  with- 
out knowing  it,  have  also  been  going  back  on  the  small  business- 
man. These  spokesmen  would  legally  guarantee  his  chances.  But 
once  guaranteed,  a  chance  becomes  a  sinecure.  All  the  private 
and  public  virtues  that  self-help,  manly  competition,  and  cupidity 
are  supposed  to  foster  would  be  denied  the  little  businessman. 
The  government  would  expropriate  the  very  basis  of  political 
freedom  and  of  the  free  personality.  If,  as  is  so  frequently  insisted 
by  senators,  'Democracy  can  exist  only  in  a  capitalistic  system 
in  which  the  life  of  the  individual  is  controlled  by  supply  and 
demand,'  then  democracy  may  be  finished.  It  is  now  frequently 
added,  however,  that  to  save  capitalism,  the  government  'must 
prevent  small  business  from  being  shattered  and  destroyed.'  The 
new  way  of  salvation  replaces  the  old  faith  in  supply  and  demand 
with  the  hope  of  governmental  aid  and  legalized  comfort.  By 
trying  to  persuade  the  government  to  ration  out  the  main  chance, 
large  and  small  business  alike  are  helping  to  destroy  the  meaning 
of  competition  in  the  style  of  life  and  the  free  society  of  the  old 
middle  classes. 


4.   Political  Persistence 

The  old  middle  classes  are  still  the  chief  anchors  of  the  old 
American  way,  and  the  old  way  is  still  strong.  Yet  American  his- 
tory of  the  last  century  often  seems  to  be  a  series  of  mishaps  for 
the  independent  man.  Whatever  occasional  victories  he  may  have 
won,  this  man  has  been  fighting  against  the  main  drift  of  a  new 
society;  even  his  victories  have  turned  out  to  be  illusory  or  tem- 
porary. 

The  economic  tensions  that  developed  in  the  world  of  the  small 
entrepreneur  and  took  political  shape  as  this  world  was  being 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  55 

destroyed  were  not  between  classes  with  and  without  property. 
That  conflict  was  distracted  by  another,  which  has  determined 
the  course  of  U.S.  poHtics:  Until  very  recently,  pohtical  issues 
have  been  fought  between  holders  of  small  property,  mainly 
rural,  and  holders  of  large  property,  mainly  industrial  and  finan- 
cial. While  all  the  people  were  not  owners,  there  were  too  many 
who  thought  they  soon  would  be  to  fight  politically  against  the 
institution  of  property  itself.  Politics  was  sidetracked  into  a  fight 
between  various  sizes  and  types  of  property,  while  more  and 
more  of  the  population  had  no  property  of  any  size  or  type,  and 
increasingly  no  chance  to  get[anyj 

No  U.S.  political  leader  with  following  (with  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  Debs  with  his  900,000  votes  in  1912)  has  ventured 
even  to  discuss  seriously  the  overturning  of  property  relations. 
In  American  politics,  those  relations  have  been  assumed,  their 
strength  rooted  in  the  small  entrepreneur's  world,  in  which  work 
created  property  before  men's  eyes,  and  in  which  pursuit  of 
private  gain  seemed  to  be  visibly  in  harmony  with  the  public 
good.  'A  nation  consisting  mainly  of  small  capitalists  and  a  gov- 
ernment under  their  control  is  the  outspoken  ideal  of  American 
statesmen  .  .  .  from  Jefferson  and  Lincoln  to  Roosevelt  and 
Wilson,'  wrote  William  Walling,  one  of  the  most  penetrating 
analysts  of  the  Progressive  Era.  Such  a  society  is  viewed  in 
American  political  rhetoric  as  eternal;  and  no  society  is  thought 
to  be  genuinely  civilized  until  it  has  obtained  the  'social  maturity' 
of  division  into  small  holdings.  'The  idea  is  that  the  small  capi- 
talist ought  to  be  a  privileged  class  and  ought  to  rule  the  country, 
and  that  other  classes  ought  to  be  prevented  from  growing  too 
large,  if  possible,  or  at  least  should  be  kept  from  power.  .  .' 

The  old  middle  classes  were  perhaps  at  the  height  of  their 
political  consciousness  when  they  made  their  last  political  stand 
in  the  Progressive  Era.  The  fight  against  plutocracy  was  a  fight 
in  the  name  and  in  the  interests  of  the  small  capitalist  on  farm 
and  in  city.  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  Woodrow  Wilson  were  its 
leading  rhetoricians.  Wilson,  who  represented  the  whole  system 
of  business,  regarded  it  as  a  system  in  which  government  should 
abolish  private  monopolies  and  hold  any  large  interests  which 
are  not  monopolies  'in  their  places.'  Small  businesses,  he  insisted, 
are  to  be  provided  for  the  whole  population;  each  generation 


56  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

should  look  forward  'to  becoming  not  employees  but  heads  of 
small,  it  may  be,  but  hopeful  businesses.'  Could  Wilson  imagine 
any  U.S.  government  except  a  government  of  small  capitalists? 
In  Roosevelt's  version,  new  classes,  according  to  Walling,  were 
'to  be  admitted  to  power,  but  only  as  they  become  small  capi- 
talists: "Ultimately  we  desire  to  use  the  government  to  aid,  as 
far  as  safely  can  be  done,  the  industrial  tool  users  to  become  in 
part  tool-owners  just  as  the  farmers  now  are." '  'The  growth  in 
the  complexity  of  community  life,'  said  Roosevelt,  'means  the 
partial  substitution  of  collectivism  for  individualism,  not  to  de- 
stroy, but  to  save,  individualism.' 

The  two  general  lines  of  strategy  taken  by  hberal  theorists  and 
old  middle-class  politicians,  led  by  these  two  men,  were:  (1)  The 
view  as  expressed  by  Herbert  Croly— and  Theodore  Roosevelt— 
that  large  concentrations  of  property  should  be  fought  indirectly. 
By  bringing  them  under  governmental  control,  through  taxation 
and  governmental  guidance,  he  hoped  to  make  monopolies  func- 
tion in  the  interest  of  public  welfare,  to  make  big  business  honest 
and  respectable,  in  the  manner  of  little  business,  and  to  give 
more  little  businesses  the  chance  to  become  big.  (2)  Following 
the  traditional  JeflFersonian  animus,  the  view  of  Louis  D.  Bran- 
deis  and  Woodrow  Wilson,  the  view  that  favored  the  outright 
breaking  up  of  large  monopolies  and  the  restoration  of  the  world 
of  small  free  men.  However  the  expedient  details  may  have  dif- 
fered, American  liberalism  has  based  its  main  hope  for  democracy 
on  the  hope  that  the  small  capitalist,  doing  his  own  work,  or 
working  for  others  only  until  he  sets  up  for  himself,  would  con- 
trol the  wealth  of  the  country. 

'Progressive'  political  movements  have  thus  been  technologi- 
cally reactionary,  in  the  literal  sense;  they  have  been  carried  on 
by  those  who  were  defending  small  property  by  waging  war 
against  large  concentrations  of  property.  Breaks  in  the  major 
parties  have  been  breaks  caused  by  conflicting  tendencies  among 
old  middle-class  politicians.  In  1912,  for  example,  when  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt  broke  away  from  the  Republican  party  with  his 
Bull  Moose  campaign,  he  was  on  the  one  hand  fighting  those  who 
wanted  to  give  absolutely  free  reign  to  monopolies,  and  on  the 
other  restraining  the  nomination  of  LaFollette  as  a  Republican 
candidate.  As  Matthew  Josephson  has  shown,  the  small  men 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  57 

who  feared  and  hated  monopolies,'  who  wished  'to  make  secure 
the  small  property  holder's  way  of  life  .  .  .'  gave  and  received 
support  from  LaFollette;  it  was  primarily  for  such  little  men  that 
twelve  years  later,  in  1924,  the  largest  third-party  vote  in  the 
history  of  the  United  States  was  cast.  But  through  the  boom  and 
into  the  depression  the  monopolists  continued  to  grow.  The 
New  Deal— a  shifting  confusion  of  dominantly  middle-class  tend- 
encies—did not  materially  lessen  the  concentration  and  the  war 
continued  to  facilitate  it. 

Yet  the  small  entrepreneur  has  not  quit  easily.  Increasingly  his 
weapons  have  become  political:  a  tricky  realm  reflecting  eco- 
nomic forces  as  much  or  more  than  political  will.  While  spear- 
heading the  drive  of  technology,  the  enemies  of  the  small  entre- 
preneur have  also  fought  with  political  as  well  as  with  eco- 
nomic weapons.  These  enemies  have  been  winning  without  bene- 
fit of  popular  upsurges;  their  strength  has  not  been  people,  but 
technology  and  money  and  war.  Their  struggle  has  been  hidden, 
relentless,  and  successful. 

'Middle-class  radicalism'  in  the  United  States  has  been  in  truth 
reactionary,  for  it  could  be  realized  and  maintained  only  if  pro- 
duction were  kept  small-scale.  The  small  entrepreneur  and  his 
champions  have  accepted  the  basic  relations  of  capitalism,  but 
have  hung  back  at  an  early  stage,  and  have  gained  no  leverage 
outside  the  system  with  which  they  might  resist  its  unfolding. 
In  their  politics  of  desperation  against  large-scale  property,  small 
businessmen  and  independent  farmers  have  demanded  that  the 
state  guarantee  the  existence  and  profits  of  their  small  properties. 

An  economy  dominated  by  small-scale  factories,  shops,  and 
farms  may  be  integrated  by  a  multitude  of  transactions  between 
individual  men  on  free  markets.  The  spread  of  large  enterprises 
has  diminished  the  number  and  areas  of  those  transactions. 
Larger  areas  of  modern  society  are  integrated  by  bureaucratic 
units  of  management,  and  such  market  freedom  as  persists  is 
more  or  less  confined  to  higgling  and  conniving  among  bureau- 
cratic agents,  and  to  areas  not  yet  in  the  grip  of  big  manage- 
ment. The  distribution  ^f  man's  independence,  in  so  far  as  it  is 
rooted  in  the  ownership  and  control  of  his  means  of  livelihood 
and  his  equality  of  power  in  the  market,  is  thus  drastically  nar- 
rowed. The  free  market  which  co-ordinated  the  world  of  the 


58  OLD  MIDDLE  CLASSES 

small  propertied  producers  is  no  longer  the  chief  means  of  co- 
ordination. 

No  longer  mechanisms  of  an  impersonal  adjustment,  nor  sov- 
ereign guides  of  the  productive  process,  prices  are  now  the  object 
of  powerful  bargainings  between  the  political  blocs  of  big  busi- 
ness, big  farmers,  and  big  labor.  Price  changes  are  signals  of  the 
relative  powers  of  these  interest  blocs  rather  than  signals  of 
demand  and  supply  on  the  part  of  scattered  producers  and  con- 
sumers. War,  slump,  and  boom  increase  this  managed  balance 
of  power  as  against  the  self-balance  of  the  old  free  market  society. 
Other  means  of  integration  are  indeed  now  needed  to  prop  up 
what  old  market  mechanisms  still  work.  In  three  or  four  gen- 
erations the  United  States  has  passed  from  a  loose  scatter  of 
enterprisers  to  an  increasingly  bureaucratic  co-ordination  of  spe- 
cialized occupational  structures.  Its  economy  has  become  a  bu- 
reaucratic cage. 

Political  freedom  and  economic  security  have  different  mean- 
ings and  different  bases  in  the  social  structure  that  has  resulted 
from  the  centralization  of  property.  When  widely  distributed 
properties  are  the  dominant  means  of  independent  livelihood, 
men  are  free  and  secure  within  the  limits  of  their  abilities  and 
the  framework  of  the  market.  Their  political  freedom  does  not 
contradict  their  economic  security;  both  are  rooted  in  ownership. 
Political  power,  resting  upon  this  ownership,  is  evenly  enough 
distributed  to  secure  political  freedom;  economic  security, 
founded  upon  one  man's  property,  is  not  the  basis  for  another 
man's  insecurity.  Control  over  the  property  with  which  one  works 
is  the  keystone  of  a  classic  democratic  system  which,  for  a  while, 
united  political  freedom  and  economic  security. 

But  the  centralization  of  property  has  shifted  the  basis  of  eco- 
nomic security  from  property  ownership  to  job  holding;  the 
power  inherent  in  huge  properties  has  jeopardized  the  old  balance 
which  gave  political  freedom.  Now  unlimited  freedom  to  do  as 
one  wishes  with  one's  property  is  at  the  same  time  freedom  to 
do  what  one  wishes  to  the  freedom  and  the  security  of  thousands 
of  dependent  employees.  For  the  employees,  freedom  and  secu- 
rity, both  political  and  economic,  can  no  longer  rest  upon  indi- 
vidual independence  in  the  old  sense.  To  be  free  and  to  be  secure 


THE  RHETORIC  OF  COMPETITION  59 

is  to  have  an  effective  control  over  that  upon  which  one  is  de- 
pendent: the  job  within  the  centralized  enterprise. 

The  broad  linkage  of  enterprise  and  property,  the  cradle-con- 
dition of  classic  democracy,  no  longer  exists  in  America.  This  is 
no  society  of  small  entrepreneurs— now  they  are  one  stratum 
among  others:  above  them  is  the  big  money;  below  them,  the 
alienated  employee;  before  them,  the  fate  of  politically  depend- 
ent relics;  behind  them,  their  world. 


TWO 

White  Collar  Worlds 


4 


The  New  Middle  Class,  I 


In  the  early  nineteenth  century,  although  there  are  no  exact 
figures,  probably  four-fifths  of  the  occupied  population  were 
self-employed  enterprisers;  by  1870,  only  about  one-third,  and 
in  1940,  only  about  one-fifth,  were  still  in  this  old  middle  class. 
Many  of  the  remaining  four-fifths  of  the  people  who  now  earn 
a  living  do  so  by  working  for  the  2  or  3  per  cent  of  the  popu- 
lation who  now  own  40  or  50  per  cent  of  the  private  property 
in  the  United  States.  Among  these  workers  are  the  members  of 
the  new  middle  class,  white-collar  people  on  salary.  For  them, 
as  for  wage-workers,  America  has  become  a  nation  of  employees 
for  whom  independent  property  is  out  of  range.  Labor  markets, 
not  control  of  property,  determine  their  chances  to  receive  in- 
come, exercise  power,  enjoy  prestige,  learn  and  use  skills. 

1.  Occupational  Change 

Of  the  three  broad  strata  composing  modern  society,  only  the 
new  middle  class  has  steadily  grown  in  proportion  to  the  whole. 
Eighty   years   ago,   there 
were  three-quarters  of  a      The  Labor  Force         1870  1940 

million   middle-class   em-      old  Middle  Class  33%  20% 

ployees;    by    1940,    there      New  Middle  Class  6  25 

were  over  twelve  and   a      Wage-Workers 61 55 

half  million.  In  that  period      j^j^  100%  100% 

the  old  middle  class  in- 

63 


64  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

creased  135  per  cent;  wage-workers,  255  per  cent;  new  middle 
class,  1600  per  cent.* 

The  employees  composing  the  new  middle  class  do  not  make 
up  one  single  compact  stratum.  They  have  not  emerged  on  a 
single  horizontal  level,  but  have  been  shuffled  out  simultaneously 
on  the  several  levels  of  modem  society;  they  now  form,  as  it 
were,  a  new  pyramid  within  the  old  pyramid  of  society  at  large, 
rather  than  a  horizontal  layer.  The  great  bulk  of  the  new  middle 
class  are  of  the  lower  middle-income  brackets,  but  regardless  of 
how  social  stature  is  measured,  types  of  white-collar  men  and 
women  range  from  almost  the  top  to  almost  the  bottom  of 
modern  society. 

The  managerial  stratum,  subject  to  minor  variations  during 
these  decades,  has  dropped  slightly,  from  14  to  10  per  cent;  the 

salaried  professionals,  dis- 
New  MroDLE  Class      1870  1940     playing   the   same  minor 

ups  and  downs,  have 
dropped  from  30  to  25 
per  cent  of  the  new  mid- 
dle class.  The  major  shifts 
T^td  100%  100%      in     over-all     composition 

have  been  in  the  relative 
decline  of  the  sales  group,  occurring  most  sharply  around  1900, 
from  44  to  25  per  cent  of  the  total  new  middle  class;  and  the 
steady  rise  of  the  office  workers,  from  12  to  40  per  cent.  Today 
the  three  largest  occupational  groups  in  the  white-coUar  stratum 
are  schoolteachers,  salespeople  in  and  out  of  stores,  and  assorted 
office  workers.  These  three  form  the  white-coUar  mass. 

White-collar  occupations  now  engage  well  over  half  the  mem- 
bers of  the  American  middle  class  as  a  whole.  Between  1870  and 
1940,  white-collar  workers  rose  from  15  to  56  per  cent  of  the 
middle  brackets,  while  the  old  middle  class  declined  from  85  to 
44  per  cent: 

*  For  the  sources  of  the  figures  in  Part  n,  see  Sources  and  Acknowl- 
edgments. In  the  tables  in  this  section,  figures  for  the  intermediate 
years  are  appropriately  graded;  the  change  has  been  more  or  less 
steady. 


Managers 

14% 

10% 

Salaried  Professionals 

30 

25 

Salespeople 

44 

25 

Office  Workers 

12 

40 

OLD   MIDDLE   CLASS 

85% 

44% 

Farmers 

62 

23 

Businessmen 

21 

19 

Free  Professionals 

2 

2 

NEW    MIDDLE    CLASS 

15% 

56% 

Managers 

2 

6 

Salaried  Professionals 

:     4 

14 

Salespeople 

7 

14 

OflBce  Workers 

2 

22 

Total  Middle  Classes     100%  100% 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,   I  65 

Negatively,    the    trans-      The  Middle  Classes    1870  1940 

formation  of  the  middle 
class  is  a  shift  from  prop- 
erty to  no-property;  posi- 
tively, it  is  a  shift  from 
property  to  a  new  axis  of 
stratification,  occupation. 
The  nature  and  well- 
being  of  the  old  middle 
class  can  best  be  sought 
in  the  condition  of  entre- 
preneurial property;  of 
the  new  middle  class,  in  the  economics  and  sociology  of  occu- 
pations. The  numerical  decline  of  the  older,  independent  sectors 
of  the  middle  class  is  an  incident  in  the  centralization  of  prop- 
erty; the  numerical  rise  of  the  newer  salaried  employees  is  due 
to  the  industrial  mechanics  by  which  the  occupations  composing 
the  new  middle  class  have  arisen. 

2.  industrial  Mechanics 

In  modern  society,  occupations  are  specific  functions  within  a 
social  division  of  labor,  as  well  as  skills  sold  for  income  on  a 
labor  market.  Contemporary  divisions  of  labor  involve  a  hitherto 
unknown  specialization  of  skill:  from  arranging  abstract  symbols, 
at  $1000  an  hour,  to  working  a  shovel,  for  $1000  a  year.  The 
major  shifts  in  occupations  since  the  Civil  War  have  assumed 
this  industrial  trend:  as  a  proportion  of  the  labor  force,  fewer 
individuals  manipulate  things,  more  handle  people  and  symbols. 

This  shift  in  needed  skills  is  another  way  of  describing  the 
rise  of  the  white-collar  workers,  for  their  characteristic  skills  in- 
volve the  handling  of  paper  and  money  and  people.  They  are 
expert  at  dealing  with  people  transiently  and  impersonally;  they 
are  masters  of  the  commercial,  professional,  and  technical  rela- 
tionship. The  one  thing  they  do  not  do  is  live  by  making  things; 
rather,  they  Hve  off  the  social  machineries  that  organize  and  co- 
ordinate the  people  who  do  make  things.  White-collar  people 
help  turn  what  someone  else  has  made  into  profit  for  still  an- 


Producing 

11% 

46% 

Servicing 

13 

20 

Distributing 

7 

23 

Co-ordinating 

3 

11 

66  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

other;  some  of  them  are  closer  to  the  means  of  production,  super- 
vising the  work  of  actual  manufacture  and  recording  what  is 
done.  They  are  the  people  who  keep  track;  they  man  the  paper 
routines  involved  in  distributing  what  is  produced.  They  provide 
technical  and  personal  services,  and  they  teach  others  the  skills 
which  they  themselves  practice,  as  well  as  all  other  skills  trans- 
mitted by  teaching. 

As  the  proportion  of  workers  needed  for  the  extraction  and 

production  of  things  declines, 
1870  1940  t}je  proportion  needed  for  serv- 
icing, distributing,  and  co-ordi- 
nating rises.  In  1870,  over  three- 
fourths,  and  in  1940,  slightly 
less  than  one-half  of  the  total 
Total  employed  100%  100%  employed  were  engaged  in  pro- 
ducing things. 
By  1940,  the  proportion  of  white-collar  workers  of  those  em- 
ployed in  industries  primarily  involved  in  the  production  of 
things  was  11  per  cent;  in  service  industries,  32  per  cent;  in  dis- 
tribution, 44  per  cent;  and  in  co-ordination,  60  per  cent.  The 
white-collar  industries  themselves  have  growTi,  and  within  each 
industry  the  white-collar  occupations  have  grown.  Three  trends 
lie  back  of  the  fact  that  the  white-collar  ranks  have  thus  been 
the  most  rapidly  growing  of  modem  occupations:  the  increasing 
productivity  of  machinery  used  in  manufacturing;  the  magnifi- 
cation of  distribution;  and  the  increasing  scale  of  co-ordination. 

The  immense  productivity  of  mass-production  technique  and 
the  increased  application  of  technologic  rationality  are  the  first 
open  secrets  of  modem  occupational  change:  fewer  men  turn 
out  more  things  in  less  time.  In  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, as  J.  F.  Dewhurst  and  his  associates  have  calculated,  some 
17.6  billion  horsepower  hours  were  expended  in  American  in- 
dustry, only  6  per  cent  by  mechanical  energy;  by  the  middle  of 
the  twentieth  century,  410.4  billion  horsepower  hours  will  be 
expended,  94  per  cent  by  mechanical  energy.  This  industrial  rev- 
olution seems  to  be  permanent,  seems  to  go  on  through  war  and 
boom  and  slump;  thus  'a  decline  in  production  results  in  a  more 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  I  67 

than  proportional  decline  in  employment;  and  an  increase  in  pro- 
duction results  in  a  less  than  proportional  increase  in  employ- 
ment.' 

Technology  has  thus  narrowed  the  stratum  of  workers  needed 
for  given  volumes  of  output;  it  has  also  altered  the  types  and  pro- 
portions of  skill  needed  in  the  production  process.  Know-how, 
once  an  attribute  of  tlie  mass  of  workers,  is  now  in  the  machine 
and  the  engineering  elite  who  design  it.  Machines  displace  un- 
skilled workmen,  make  craft  skills  unnecessary,  push  up  front  the 
automatic  motions  of  the  machine-operative.  Workers  composing 
the  new  lower  class  are  predominantly  semi-skilled:  their  pro- 
portion in  the  urban  wage-worker  stratum  has  risen  from  31  per 
cent  in  1910  to  41  per  cent  in  1940. 

The  manpower  economies  brought  about  by  machinery  and 
the  large-scale  rationalization  of  labor  forces,  so  apparent  in  pro- 
duction and  extraction,  have  not,  as  yet,  been  applied  so  exten- 
sively in  distribution— transportation,  communication,  finance, 
and  trade.  Yet  without  an  elaboration  of  these  means  of  distribu- 
tion, the  wide-flung  operations  of  multi-plant  producers  could 
not  be  integrated  nor  their  products  distributed.  Therefore,  the 
proportion  of  people  engaged  in  distribution  has  enormously  in- 
creased so  that  today  about  one-fourth  of  the  labor  force  is  so 
engaged.  Distribution  has  expanded  more  than  production  be- 
cause of  the  lag  in  technological  application  in  this  field,  and 
because  of  the  persistence  of  individual  and  small-scale  entrepre- 
neurial units  at  the  same  time  that  the  market  has  been  enlarged 
and  the  need  to  market  has  been  deepened. 

Behind  this  expansion  of  the  distributive  occupations  lies  the 
central  problem  of  modern  capitalism:  to  whom  can  the  avail- 
able goods  be  sold?  As  volume  swells,  the  intensified  search  for 
markets  draws  more  workers  into  the  distributive  occupations  of 
trade,  promotion,  advertising.  As  far-flung  and  intricate  markets 
come  into  being,  and  as  the  need  to  find  and  create  even  more 
markets  becomes  urgent,  'middle  men'  who  move,  store,  finance, 
promote,  and  sell  goods  are  knit  into  a  vast  network  of  enterprises 
and  occupations. 

The  physical  aspect  of  distribution  involves  wide  and  fast 
transportation  networks;  the  co-ordination  of  marketing  involves 


68  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

communication;  the  search  for  markets  and  the  selHng  of  goods 
involves  trade,  including  wholesale  and  retail  outlets  as  well  as 
financial  agencies  for  commodity  and  capital  markets.  Each  of 
these  activities  engage  more  people,  but  the  manual  jobs  among 
them  do  not  increase  so  fast  as  the  white-collar' tasks. 

Transportation,  growing  rapidly  after  the  Civil  War,  began  to 
decline  in  point  of  the  numbers  of  people  involved  before  1930; 
but  this  decline  took  place  among  wage-workers;  the  proportion 
of  white-collar  workers  employed  in  transportation  continued  to 
rise.  By  1940,  some  23  per  cent  of  the  people  in  transportation 
were  white-collar  employees.  As  a  new  industrial  segment  of  the 
U.S.  economy,  the  communication  industry  has  never  been  run  by 
large  numbers  of  free  enterprisers;  at  the  outset  it  needed  large 
numbers  of  technical  and  other  white-collar  workers.  By  1940, 
some  77  per  cent  of  its  people  were  in  new  middle-class  occu- 
pations. 

Trade  is  now  the  third  largest  segment  of  the  occupational 
structure,  exceeded  only  by  farming  and  manufacturing.  A  few 
years  after  the  Civil  War  less  than  5  out  of  every  100  workers 
were  engaged  in  trade;  by  1940  almost  12  out  of  every  100  work- 
ers were  so  employed.  But,  while  70  per  cent  of  those  in  whole- 
saling and  retailing  were  free  enterprisers  in  1870,  and  less  than 
3  per  cent  were  white  collar,  by  1940,  of  the  people  engaged  in 
retail  trade  27  per  cent  were  free  enterprisers;  41  per  cent  white- 
collar  employees. 

Newer  methods  of  merchandising,  such  as  credit  financing, 
have  resulted  in  an  even  greater  percentage  increase  in  the  'finan- 
cial' than  in  the  'commercial'  agents  of  distribution.  Branch  bank- 
ing has  lowered  the  status  of  many  banking  employees  to  the 
clerical  level,  and  reduced  the  number  of  executive  positions.  By 
1940,  of  all  employees  in  finance  and  real  estate  70  per  cent  were 
white-coUar  workers  of  the  new  middle  class. 

The  organizational  reason  for  the  expansion  of  the  white- 
collar  occupations  is  the  rise  of  big  business  and  big  government, 
and  the  consequent  trend  of  modern  social  structure,  the  steady 
growth  of  bureaucracy.  In  every  branch  of  the  economy,  as  finns 
merge  and  corporations  become  dominant,  free  entrepreneurs 
become  employees,  and  the  calculations  of  accountant,  statis- 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  I  69 

tician,  bookkeeper,  and  clerk  in  these  corporations  replace  the 
free  'movement  of  prices'  as  the  co-ordinating  agent  of  the  eco- 
nomic system.  The  rise  of  thousands  of  big  and  little  bureaucracies 
and  the  elaborate  specialization  of  the  system  as  a  whole  create 
the  need  for  many  men  and  women  to  plan,  co-ordinate,  and  ad- 
minister new  routines  for  others.  In  moving  from  smaller  to  larger 
and  more  elaborate  units  of  economic  activity,  increased  propor- 
tions of  employees  are  drawn  into  co-ordinating  and  managing. 
Managerial  and  professional  employees  and  oflBce  workers  of 
varied  sorts— floorwalkers,  foremen,  office  managers— are  needed; 
people  to  whom  subordinates  report,  and  who  in  turn  report  to 
superiors,  are  links  in  chains  of  power  and  obedience,  co-ordinat- 
ing and  supervising  other  occupational  experiences,  functions, 
and  skills.  And  all  over  the  economy,  the  proportion  of  clerks  of 
all  sorts  has  increased:  from  1  or  2  per  cent  in  1870  to  10  or  11 
per  cent  of  all  gainful  workers  in  1940. 

As  the  worlds  of  business  undergo  these  changes,  the  increased 
tasks  of  government  on  all  fronts  draw  still  more  people  into 
occupations  that  regulate  and  service  property  and  men.  In  re- 
sponse to  the  largeness  and  predatory  complications  of  business, 
the  crises  of  slump,  the  nationalization  of  the  rural  economy  and 
small-town  markets,  the  flood  of  immigrants,  the  urgencies  of 
war  and  the  march  of  technology  disrupting  social  life,  govern- 
ment increases  its  co-ordinating  and  regulating  tasks.  Public  reg- 
ulations, social  services,  and  business  taxes  require  more  people 
to  make  mass  records  and  to  integrate  people,  firms,  and  goods, 
both  within  government  and  in  the  various  segments  of  business 
and  private  life.  All  branches  of  government  have  grown,  al- 
though the  most  startling  increases  are  found  in  the  executive 
branch  of  the  Federal  Government,  where  the  needs  for  co-ordi- 
nating the  economy  have  been  most  prevalent. 

As  marketable  activities,  occupations  change  (1)  with  shifts 
in  the  skills  required,  as  technology  and  rationalization  are  un- 
evenly applied  across  the  economy;  (2)  with  the  enlargement 
and  intensification  of  marketing  operations  in  both  the  com- 
modity and  capital  markets;  and  (3)  with  shifts  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  division  of  work,  as  expanded  organizations  require 
co-ordination,  management,  and  recording.  The  mechanics  in- 


70  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

volved  within  and  between  these  three  trends  have  led  to  the 
numerical  expansion  of  white-collar  employees. 

There  are  other  less  obvious  ways  in  which  the  occupational 
structure  is  shaped:  high  agricultural  tariflFs,  for  example,  delay 
the  decline  of  farming  as  an  occupation;  were  Argentine  beef 
allowed  to  enter  duty-free,  the  number  of  meat  producers  here 
might  diminish.  City  ordinances  and  zoning  laws  abolish  peddlers 
and  affect  the  types  of  construction  workers  that  prevail.  Most 
states  have  bureaus  of  standards  which  limit  entrance  into  pro- 
fessions and  semi-professions;  at  the  same  time  members  of  these 
occupations  form  associations  in  the  attempt  to  control  entrance 
into  'their'  market.  More  successful  than  most  trade  unions,  such 
professional  associations  as  the  American  Medical  Association 
have  managed  for  several  decades  to  level  off  the  proportion  of 
physicians  and  surgeons.  Every  phase  of  the  slump-war-boom 
cycle  influences  the  numerical  importance  of  various  occupations; 
for  instance,  the  movement  back  and  forth  between  'construc- 
tion worker'  and  small  'contractor'  is  geared  to  slumps  and  booms 
in  building. 

The  pressures  from  these  loosely  organized  parts  of  the  occu- 
pational world  draw  conscious  managerial  agencies  into  the  pic- 
ture. The  effects  of  attempts  to  manage  occupational  change, 
directly  and  indirectly,  are  not  yet  great,  except  of  course  during 
wars,  when  government  freezes  men  in  their  jobs  or  offers  in- 
centives and  compulsions  to  remain  in  old  occupations  or  shift 
to  new  ones.  Yet,  increasingly  the  class  levels  and  occupational 
composition  of  the  nation  are  managed;  the  occupational  struc- 
ture of  the  United  States  is  being  slowly  reshaped  as  a  gigantic 
corporate  group.  It  is  subject  not  only  to  the  pulling  of  autono- 
mous markets  and  the  pushing  of  technology  but  to  an  'alloca- 
tion of  personnel'  from  central  points  of  control.  Occupational 
change  thus  becomes  more  conscious,  at  least  to  those  who  are 
coming  to  be  in  charge  of  it. 

3.  White-Collar   Pyramids 

Occupations,  in  terms  of  which  we  circumscribe  the  new  mid- 
dle class,  involve  several  ways  of  ranking  people.  As  specific 
activities,  they  entail  various  types  and  levels  of  skill,  and  their 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  I  71 

exercise  fulfils  certain  functions  within  an  industrial  division  of 
labor.  These  are  the  sldlls  and  functions  we  have  been  examining 
statistically.  As  sources  of  income,  occupations  are  connected 
with  class  position;  and  since  they  normally  carry  an  expected 
quota  of  prestige,  on  and  off  the  job,  they  are  relevant  to  status 
position.  They  also  involve  certain  degrees  of  power  over  other 
people,  directly  in  terms  of  the  job,  and  indirectly  in  other  social 
areas.  Occupations  are  thus  tied  to  class,  status,  and  power  as 
well  as  to  skill  and  function;  to  understand  the  occupations  com- 
posing the  new  middle  class,  we  must  consider  them  in  terms 
of  each  of  these  dimensions.* 

'Class  situation'  in  its  simplest  objective  sense  has  to  do  with 
the  amount  and  source  of  income.  Today,  occupation  rather  than 
property  is  the  source  of  income  for  most  of  those  who  receive 
any  direct  income:  the  possibilities  of  selling  their  services  in  the 
labor  market,  rather  than  of  profitably  buying  and  selling  their 
property  and  its  yields,  now  determine  the  life-chances  of  most 
of  the  middle  class.  All  things  money  can  buy  and  many  that 
men  dream  about  are  theirs  by  virtue  of  occupational  income. 
In  new  middle-class  occupations  men  work  for  someone  else  on 
someone  else's  property.  This  is  the  clue  to  many  differences  be- 
tween the  old  and  new  middle  classes,  as  well  as  to  the  contrast 
between  the  older  world  of  the  small  propertied  entrepreneur 
and  the  occupational  structure  of  the  new  society.  If  the  old 
middle  class  once  fought  big  property  structures  in  the  name 
of  small,  free  properties,  the  new  middle  class,  like  the  wage- 
workers  in  latter-day  capitalism,  has  been,  from  the  beginning, 
dependent  upon  large  properties  for  job  security. 

Wage-workers  in  the  factory  and  on  the  farm  are  on  the  prop- 
ertyless  bottom  of  the  occupational  structure,  depending  upon 
the  equipment  owned  by  others,  earning  wages  for  the  time  they 
spend  at  work.  In  terms  of  property,  the  white-collar  people  are 
not  'in  between  Capital  and  Labor';  they  are  in  exactly  the  same 
property-class  position  as  the  wage-workers.  They  have  no  direct 

'  The  following  pages  are  not  intended  as  a  detailed  discussion  of 
the  class,  prestige,  and  power  of  the  white-collar  occupations,  but  as 
preliminary  and  definitional.  See  Chapter  11  for  Status,  12  for  Class, 
15  for  Power. 


72  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

financial  tie  to  the  means  of  production,  no  prime  claim  upon  the 
proceeds  from  property.  Like  factory  workers— and  day  laborers, 
for  that  matter— they  work  for  those  who  do  own  such  means  of 
livelihood. 

Yet  if  bookkeepers  and  coal  miners,  insurance  agents  and  farm 
laborers,  doctors  in  a  clinic  and  crane  operators  in  an  open  pit 
have  this  condition  in  common,  certainly  their  class  situations 
are  not  the  same.  To  understand  their  class  positions,  we  must  go 
beyond  the  common  fact  of  source  of  income  and  consider  as  well 
the  amount  of  income. 

In  1890,  the  average  income  of  white-collar  occupational  groups 
was  about  double  that  of  wage-workers.  Before  World  War  I, 
salaries  were  not  so  adversely  afiFected  by  slumps  as  wages  were 
but,  on  the  contrary,  they  rather  steadily  advanced.  Since  World 
War  I,  however,  salaries  have  been  reacting  to  turns  in  the  eco- 
nomic cycles  more  and  more  like  wages,  although  still  to  a  lesser 
extent.  If  wars  help  wages  more  because  of  the  greater  flexibility 
of  wages,  slumps  help  salaries  because  of  their  greater  inflexi- 
bility. Yet  after  each  war  era,  salaries  have  never  regained  their 
previous  advantage  over  wages.  Each  phase  of  the  cycle,  as  well 
as  the  progressive  rise  of  all  income  groups,  has  resulted  in  a  nar- 
rowing of  the  income  gap  between  wage-workers  and  white- 
collar  employees. 

In  the  middle  'thirties  the  three  urban  strata,  entrepreneurs, 
white-collar,  and  wage-workers,  formed  a  distinct  scale  with  re- 
spect to  median  family  income:  the  white-collar  employees  had 
a  median  income  of  $1,896;  the  entrepreneurs,  $1,464;  the  urban 
wage-workers,  $1,175.  Although  the  median  income  of  white- 
collar  workers  was  higher  than  that  of  the  entrepreneurs,  larger 
proportions  of  the  entrepreneurs  received  both  high-level  and 
low-level  incomes.  The  distribution  of  their  income  was  spread 
more  than  that  of  the  white  collar. 

The  wartime  boom  in  incomes,  in  fact,  spread  the  incomes  of 
all  occupational  groups,  but  not  evenly.  The  spread  occurred 
mainly  among  urban  entrepreneurs.  As  an  income  level,  the  old 
middle  class  in  the  city  is  becoming  less  an  evenly  graded  income 
group,  and  more  a  collection  of  different  strata,  with  a  large  pro- 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  I  73 

portion  of  lumpen-bourgeoisie  who  receive  very  low  incomes, 
and  a  small,  prosperous  bourgeoisie  with  very  high  incomes. 

In  the  late  'forties  (1948,  median  family  income)  the  income 
of  all  white-collar  workers  was  $4000,  that  of  all  urban  wage- 
workers,  $3300.  These  averages,  however,  should  not  obscure 
the  overlap  of  specific  groups  within  each  stratum:  the  lower 
white-collar  people— sales-employees  and  ofiBce  workers— earned 
almost  the  same  as  skilled  workers  and  foremen,*  but  more  than 
semi-skilled  urban  wage-workers. 

In  terms  of  property,  white-collar  people  are  in  the  same  posi- 
tion as  wage-workers;  in  terms  of  occupational  income,  they  are 
'somewhere  in  the  middle.'  Once  they  were  considerably  above 
the  wage- workers;  they  haVe  become  less  so;  in  the  middle  of  the 
century  they  still  have  an  edge  but  the  over-all  rise  in  incomes  is 
making  the  new  middle  class  a  more  homogeneous  income  group. 

As  with  income,  so  with  prestige:  white-collar  groups  are  dif- 
ferentiated socially,  perhaps  more  decisively  than  wage-workers 
and  entrepreneurs.  Wage  earners  certainly  do  form  an  income 
pyramid  and  a  prestige  gradation,  as  do  entrepreneurs  and  ren- 
tiers; but  the  new  middle  class,  in  terms  of  income  and  prestige, 
is  a  superimposed  pyramid,  reaching  from  almost  the  bottom  of 
the  first  to  almost  the  top  of  the  second. 

People  in  white-collar  occupations  claim  higher  prestige  than 
wage-workers,  and,  as  a  general  rule,  can  cash  in  their  claims 
with  wage-workers  as  well  as  with  the  anonymous  public.  This 
fact  has  been  seized  upon,  with  much  justification,  as  the  defin- 
ing characteristic  of  the  white-collar  strata,  and  although  there 
are  definite  indications  in  the  United  States  of  a  decline  in  their 
prestige,  still,  on  a  nation-wide  basis,  the  majority  of  even  the 
lower  white-collar  employees— ofiice  workers  and  salespeople- 
enjoy  a  middling  prestige. 

The  historic  bases  of  the  white-collar  employees'  prestige,  apart 
from  superior  income,  have  included  the  similarity  of  their  place 
and  type  of  work  to  those  of  the  old  middle-classes'  which  has 

*  It  is  impossible  to  isolate  the  salaried  foremen  from  the  skilled 
urban  wage-workers  in  these  figures.  If  we  could  do  so,  the  income  of 
lower  white-collar  workers  would  be  closer  to  that  of  semi-skilled 
workers. 


74  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

permitted  them  to  borrow  prestige.  As  their  relations  with  entre- 
preneur and  with  esteemed  customer  have  become  more  imper- 
sonal, they  have  borrowed  prestige  from  the  firm  itself.  The 
stylization  of  their  appearance,  in  particular  the  fact  that  most 
white-collar  jobs  have  permitted  the  wearing  of  street  clothes 
on  the  job,  has  also  figured  in  their  prestige  claims,  as  have  the 
skills  required  in  most  white-collar  jobs,  and  in  many  of  them 
the  variety  of  operations  performed  and  the  degree  of  autonomy 
exercised  in  deciding  work  procedures.  Furthermore,  the  time 
taken  to  learn  these  skills  and  the  way  in  which  they  have  been 
acquired  by  formal  education  and  by  close  contact  with  the 
higher-ups  in  charge  has  been  important.  White-collar  employees 
have  monopolized  high  school  education— even  in  1940  they  had 
completed  12  grades  to  the  8  grades  for  wage-workers  and  entre- 
preneurs. They  have  also  enjoyed  status  by  descent:  in  terms  of 
race,  Negro  white-collar  employees  exist  only  in  isolated  in- 
stances—and, more  importantly,  in  terms  of  nativity,  in  1930  only 
about  9  per  cent  of  white-collar  workers,  but  16  per  cent  of  free 
enterprisers  and  21  per  cent  of  wage-workers,  were  foreign  born. 
Finally,  as  an  underlying  fact,  the  limited  size  of  the  white- 
collar  group,  compared  to  wage-workers,  has  led  to  successful 
claims  to  greater  prestige. 

The  power  position  of  groups  and  of  individuals  typically  de- 
pends upon  factors  of  class,  status,  and  occupation,  often  in  in- 
tricate interrelation.  Given  occupations  involve  specific  powers 
over  other  people  in  the  actual  course  of  work;  but  also  outside 
the  job  area,  by  virtue  of  their  relations  to  institutions  of  prop- 
erty as  well  as  the  typical  income  they  afiFord,  occupations  lend 
power.  Some  white-collar  occupations  require  the  direct  exer- 
cise of  supervision  over  other  white-collar  and  wage-workers, 
and  many  more  are  closely  attached  to  this  managerial  cadre. 
White-collar  employees  are  the  assistants  of  authority;  the  power 
they  exercise  is  a  derived  power,  but  they  do  exercise  it. 

Moreover,  within  the  white-collar  pyramids  there  is  a  charac- 
teristic pattern  of  authority  involving  age  and  sex.  The  white- 
collar  ranks  contain  a  good  many  women:  some  41  per  cent  of 
all  white-collar  employees,  as  compared  with  10  per  cent  of  free 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  I  75 

enterprisers,  and  21  per  cent  of  wage-workers,  are  women.*  As 
with  sex,  so  with  age:  free  enterprisers  average  (median)  about 
45  years  of  age,  white-collar  and  wage-workers,  about  34;  but 
among  free  enterprisers  and  wage-workers,  men  are  about  2  or 
3  years  older  than  women;  among  white-collar  workers,  there  is 
a  6-  or  7-year  difference.  In  the  white-collar  pyramids,  authority 
is  roughly  graded  by  age  and  sex:  younger  women  tend  to  be 
subordinated  to  older  men. 

The  occupational  groups  forming  the  white-collar  pyramids, 
different  as  they  may  be  from  one  another,  have  certain  common 
characteristics,  which  are  central  to  the  character  of  the  new 
middle  class  as  a  general  pyramid  overlapping  the  entrepreneurs 
and  wage-workers.  White-collar  people  cannot  be  adequately  de- 
fined along  any  one  possible  dimension  of  stratification— skill, 
function,  class,  status,  or  power.  They  are  generally  in  the  middle 
ranges  on  each  of  these  dimensions  and  on  every  descriptive  at- 
tribute. Their  position  is  more  definable  in  terms  of  their  relative 
differences  from  other  strata  than  in  any  absolute  terms. 

On  all  points  of  definition,  it  must  be  remembered  that  white- 
collar  people  are  not  one  compact  horizontal  stratum.  They  do 
not  fulfil  one  central,  positive  function  that  can  define  them,  al- 
though in  general  their  functions  are  similar  to  those  of  the  old 
middle  class.  They  deal  with  symbols  and  with  other  people, 
co-ordinating,  recording,  and  distributing;  but  they  fulfil  these 
functions  as  dependent  employees,  and  the  skills  they  thus  em- 
ploy are  sometimes  similar  in  form  and  required  mentality  to 
those  of  many  wage-workers. 

In  terms  of  property,  they  are  equal  to  wage-workers  and  dif- 
ferent from  the  old  middle  class.  Originating  as  propertyless  de- 
pendents, they  have  no  serious  expectations  of  propertied  inde- 
pendence. In  terms  of  income,  their  class  position  is,  on  the 
average,  somewhat  higher  than  that  of  wage-workers.  The  over- 
lap is  large  and  the  trend  has  been  definitely  toward  less  dif- 
ference, but  even  today  the  differences  are  significant. 

•  According  to  our  calculations,  the  proportions  of  women,  1940, 
in  these  groups  are:  farmers,  2.9%;  businesmen,  20%;  free  profes- 
sionals, 5.9%;  managers,  7.1%;  salaried  professionals,  51.7%;  sales- 
people, 27.5%  ofiBce  workers,  51%;  skilled  workers,  3.2%;  semi-skilled 
and  unskilled,  29.8%;  rural  workers,  9.1%. 


76  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

Perhaps  of  more  psychological  importance  is  the  fact  that 
white-collar  groups  have  successfully  claimed  more  prestige  than 
wage- workers  and  still  generally  continue  to  do  so.  The  bases  of 
their  prestige  may  not  be  solid  today,  and  certainly  they  show 
no  signs  of  being  permanent;  but,  however  vague  and  fragile, 
they  continue  to  mark  off  white-collar  people  from  wage- workers. 

Members  of  white-collar  occupations  exercise  a  derived  au- 
thority in  the  course  of  their  work;  moreover,  compared  to  older 
hierarchies,  the  white-collar  pyramids  are  youthful  and  feminine 
bureaucracies,  within  which  youth,  education,  and  American  birth 
are  emphasized  at  the  wide  base,  where  millions  of  office  workers 
most  clearly  typify  these  differences  between  the  new  middle 
class  and  other  occupational  groups.  White-collar  masses,  in  turn, 
are  managed  by  people  who  are  more  like  the  old  middle  class, 
having  many  of  the  social  characteristics,  if  not  the  independence, 
of  free  enterprisers. 


5 


The  Managerial  Demiurge 


As  the  means  of  administration  are  enlarged  and  centralized, 
there  are  more  managers  in  every  sphere  of  modern  society,  and 
the  managerial  type  of  man  becomes  more  important  in  the  total 
social  structure. 

These  new  men  at  the  top,  products  of  a  hundred-year  shift  in 
the  upper  brackets,  operate  within  the  new  bureaucracies,  which 
select  them  for  their  positions  and  then  shape  their  characters. 
Their  role  within  these  bureaucracies,  and  the  role  of  the  bu- 
reaucracies within  the  social  structure,  set  the  scope  and  pace  of 
the  managerial  demiurge.  So  pervasive  and  weighty  are  these 
bureaucratic  forms  of  life  that,  in  due  course,  older  types  of 
upper-bracket  men  shift  their  character  and  performance  to  join 
the  managerial  trend,  or  sink  beneath  the  upper-bracket  men. 

In  theii"  common  attempt  to  deal  with  the  underlying  popula- 
tion, the  managers  of  business  and  government  have  become  in- 
terlaced by  committee  and  pressure  group,  by  political  party  and 
trade  association.  Very  slowly,  reluctantly,  the  labor  leader  in  his 
curious  way,  during  certain  phases  of  the  business  cycle  and 
union  history,  joins  them.  The  managerial  demiurge  means  more 
than  an  increased  proportion  of  people  who  work  and  live  by 
the  rules  of  business,  government,  and  labor  bureaucracy;  it 
means  that,  at  the  top,  society  becomes  an  uneasy  interlocking  of 
private  and  public  hierarchies,  and  at  the  bottom,  more  and  more 
areas  become  objects  of  management  and  manipulation.  Bureauc- 
ratization in  the  United  States  is  by  no  means  total;  its  spread  is 
partial  and  segmental,  and  the  individual  is  caught  up  in  several 

77 


78  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

structures  at  once.  Yet,  over-all,  the  loose-jointed  integration  of 
liberal  society  is  being  replaced,  especially  in  its  war  phases,  by 
the  more  managed  integration  of  a  corporate-hke  society. 


1.  The  Bureaucracies 

As  an  epithet  for  governmental  waste  and  red  tape,  the  word 
^bureaucracy'  is  a  carry-over  from  the  heroic  age  of  capitalism, 
when  the  middle-class  entrepreneur  was  in  revolt  against  mer- 
cantile company  and  monarchist  dynasty.  That  time  is  now  long 
past,  but  the  epithet  persists  in  the  service  of  different  aims. 

In  its  present  common  meaning,  'bureaucracy'  is  inaccurate  and 
misleading  for  three  major  reasons:  (1)  When  the  corporation 
official  objects  to  'bureaucracy'  he  means  of  course  the  programs 
of  the  Federal  Government,  and  then  only  in  so  far  as  they  seem 
to  be  against  the  interests  of  his  own  private  business  bureauc- 
racy. (2)  Most  of  the  waste  and  inefficiency  associated  in  popu- 
lar imagery  with  'bureaucracy'  is,  in  fact,  a  lack  of  strict  and  com- 
plete bureaucratization.  The  'mess,'  and  certainly  the  graft,  of  the 
U.S.  Army,  are  more  often  a  result  of  a  persistence  of  the  entre- 
preneurial outlook  among  its  personnel  than  of  any  bureau- 
cratic tendencies  as  such.  Descriptively,  bureaucracy  refers  to 
a  hierarchy  of  offices  or  bureaus,  each  with  an  assigned  area  of 
operation,  each  employing  a  staff  having  specialized  qualifica- 
tions. So  defined,  bureaucracy  is  the  most  efficient  type  of  social 
organization  yet  devised.  (3)  Government  bureaucracies  are,  in 
large  part,  a  public  consequence  of  private  bureaucratic  develop- 
ments, which  by  centralizing  property  and  equipment  have  been 
the  pace  setter  of  the  bureaucratic  trend.  The  very  size  of  mod- 
ern business,  housing  the  technological  motors  and  financial 
say-so,  compels  the  rise  of  centralizing  organizations  of  formal 
rule  and  rational  subdivisions  in  all  sectors  of  society,  most  espe- 
cially in  government. 

In  business,  as  the  manufacturing  plant  expands  in  size,  it 
draws  more  people  into  its  administrative  scope.  A  smaller  pro- 
portion of  plants  employ  a  larger  proportion  of  manufacturing 
wage  earners.  Even  before  World  War  II  concentration,  1  per 
cent  of  all  the  plants  employed  over  half  the  workers.  These 
enlarged  plants  are  knit  together  in  central-office  or  multi-plant 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  79 

enterprises.  Less  than  6000  such  enterprises  control  the  plants 
that  employ  about  half  of  the  workers;  they  have  an  output  val- 
ued 760  per  cent  higher,  and  a  production  per  wage-worker  19.5 
per  cent  higher,  than  independent  plants.  Multi-plant  as  well  as 
independent-plant  enterprises  merge  together  in  various  forms 
of  corporation:  by  the  time  of  the  Great  Depression,  the  200 
largest  industrial  corporations  owned  about  half  of  the  total  in- 
dustrial wealth  of  the  country.  These  large  corporations  are 
linked  by  their  directorships  and  by  trade  associations.  Adminis- 
trative decisions  merge  into  the  check  and  balance  of  the  inter- 
locking directorships;  in  the  middle  'thirties  some  400  men  held 
a  full  third  of  the  3,544  top  seats  of  the  250  largest  corporations. 
Supra-corporate  trade  associations,  as  Robert  Brady  has  observed, 
become  'funnels  for  the  new  monopoly,'  stabilizing  and  rational- 
izing competing  managements  economically,  and  serving  as  the 
political  apparatus  for  the  whole  managerial  demiurge  of  private 
wealth. 

The  slump-war-boom  rhythm  makes  business  bureaucracy  grow. 
During  the  crises,  the  single  business  concern  becomes  tied  to  an 
intercorporate  world  which  manages  the  relations  of  large  busi- 
ness and  government.  The  larger  and  more  bureaucratic  business 
becomes,  the  more  the  Federal  Government  elaborates  itself  for 
purposes  of  attempted  control,  and  the  more  business  responds 
with  more  rational  organization.  The  bureaucracies  of  business 
tend  to  duplicate  the  regulatory  agencies  of  the  federal  hier- 
archy, to  place  their  members  within  the  governmental  commis- 
sions and  agencies,  to  hire  officials  away  from  government,  and 
to  develop  elaborate  mazes  within  which  are  hidden  the  official 
secrets  of  business  operations.  Across  the  bargaining  tables  of 
power,  the  bureaucracies  of  business  and  government  face  one 
another,  and  under  the  tables  their  myriad  feet  are  interlocked 
in  wonderfully  complex  ways. 

The  American  governing  apparatus  has  been  enlarged,  cen- 
tralized, and  professionalized  both  in  its  means  of  administration 
and  the  staff  required.  Presidents  and  governors,  mayors  and  city 
managers  have  gathered  into  their  hands  the  means  of  adminis- 
tration and  the  power  to  appoint  and  supervise.  These  officials, 
no  longer  simply  political  figures  who  deal  mainly  with  legisla- 
tures,  have   become    general    managerial    chieftains    who    deal 


80  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

mainly  with  the  subordinates  of  a  bureaucratic  hierarchy.  The 
executive  branch  of  modern  government  has  become  dynamic, 
increasing  its  functions  and  enlarging  its  staflF  at  the  expense  of 
the  legislative  and  the  judicial.  In  1929,  of  all  civilian  govern- 
mental employees  18  per  cent  were  employed  in  the  executive 
branch  of  the  Federal  Government;  in  1947,  after  the  peak  of 
World  War  II,  the  proportion  was  37  per  cent. 

Who  are  the  managers  behind  the  managerial  demiurge? 

Seen  from  below,  the  management  is  not  a  Who  but  a  series 
of  Theys  and  even  Its.  Management  is  something  one  reports  to 
in  some  office,  maybe  in  all  offices  including  that  of  the  union; 
it  is  a  printed  instruction  and  a  sign  on  a  bulletin  board;  it  is  the 
voice  coming  through  the  loudspeakers;  it  is  the  name  in  the 
newspaper;  it  is  the  signature  you  can  never  make  out,  except  it 
is  printed  underneath;  it  is  a  system  that  issues  orders  superior 
to  anybody  you  know  close-up;  it  blueprints,  specifying  in  detail, 
your  work-life  and  the  boss-life  of  your  foreman.  Management  is 
the  centralized  say-so. 

Seen  from  the  middle  ranks,  management  is  one-part  people 
who  give  you  the  nod,  one-part  system,  one-part  yourself.  White- 
collar  people  may  be  part  of  management,  like  they  say,  but  man- 
agement is  a  lot  of  things,  not  all  of  them  managing.  You  carry 
authority,  but  you  are  not  its  source.  As  one  of  the  managed, 
you  are  on  view  from  above,  and  perhaps  you  are  seen  as  a 
threat;  as  one  of  the  managers,  you  are  seen  from  below,  perhaps 
as  a  tool.  You  are  the  cog  and  the  beltline  of  the  bureaucratic 
machinery  itself;  you  are  a  link  in  the  chains  of  commands,  per- 
suasions, notices,  bills,  which  bind  together  the  men  who  make 
decisions  and  the  men  who  make  things;  without  you  the  mana- 
gerial demiurge  could  not  be.  But  your  authority  is  confined 
strictly  within  a  prescribed  orbit  of  occupational  actions,  and 
such  power  as  you  wield  is  a  borrowed  thing.  Yours  is  the  sub- 
ordinate's mark,  yours  the  canned  talk.  The  money  you  handle 
is  somebody  else's  money;  the  papers  you  sort  and  shuffle  already 
bear  somebody  else's  marks.  You  are  the  servant  of  decision,  the 
assistant  of  authority,  the  minion  of  management.  You  are  closer 
to  management  than  the  wage-workers  are,  but  yours  is  seldom 
the  last  decision. 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  81 

Seen  from  close  to  the  top,  management  is  the  ethos  of  the 
higher  circle:  concentrate  power,  but  enlarge  your  staflF,  Down 
the  line,  make  them  feel  a  part  of  what  you  are  a  part.  Set  up  a 
school  for  managers  and  manage  what  managers  learn;  open  a 
channel  of  two-way  communication:  commands  go  down,  infor- 
mation comes  up.  Keep  a  firm  grip  but  don't  boss  them,  boss 
their  experience;  don't  let  them  learn  what  you  don't  fell  them. 
Between  decision  and  execution,  between  command  and  obedi- 
ence, let  there  be  reflex.  Be  calm,  judicious,  rational;  groom  your 
personality  and  control  your  appearance;  make  business  a  profes- 
sion. Develop  yourself.  Write  a  memo;  hold  a  conference  with 
men  like  you.  And  in  all  this  be  yourself  and  be  human:  nod 
gravely  to  the  girls  in  the  oflBce;  say  hello  to  the  men;  and  always 
listen  carefully  to  the  ones  above:  'Over  last  week  end,  I  gave 
much  thought  to  the  information  you  kindly  tendered  me  on 
Friday,  especially  .  .  .' 

2.  From  the  Top  to  the  Bottom 

According  to  Edwin  G.  Nourse,  recently  head  of  the  President's 
Council  of  Economic  Advisers,  'Responsibility  for  determining 
the  direction  of  the  nation's  economic  life  today  and  of  furnish- 
ing both  opportunity  and  incentive  to  the  masses  centers  upon 
some  one  or  two  per  cent  of  the  gainfully  employed.'  The  man- 
agers, as  the  cadre  of  the  enterprise,  form  a  hierarchy,  graded 
according  to  their  authority  to  initiate  tasks,  to  plan  and  execute 
their  own  work  and  freely  to  plan  and  order  the  work  of  others. 
Each  level  in  the  cadre's  hierarchy  is  beholden  to  the  levels 
above.  Manager  talks  with  manager  and  each  manager  talks  with 
his  assistant  managers  and  to  the  employees,  that  is,  those  who 
do  not  plan  work  or  make  decisions,  but  perform  assigned  work. 
Contact  with  non-managerial  employees  probably  increases  down 
the  managerial  hierarchy:  the  top  men  rarely  talk  to  anyone  but 
secretaries  and  other  managers;  the  bottom  men  may  have  90 
per  cent  of  their  contacts  with  managed  employees.  In  employee 
parlance.  The  Boss  is  frequently  the  man  who  actually  gives 
orders;  the  top  men  are  The  Higher  Ups  who  are  typically  unap- 
proachable except  by  the  narrow  circle  directly  around  them. 


82  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

Down  the  line,  managers  are  typically  split  into  two  types: 
those  who  have  to  do  with  business  decisions  and  those  who 
have  to  do  with  the  industrial  run  of  work.  Both  are  further  sub- 
divided into  various  grades  of  importance,  often  according  to  the 
number  of  people  under  them;  both  have  assigned  duties  and 
fixed  requirements;  both  as  groups  have  been  rationalized.  The 
business  managers  range  from  top  executives  who  hold  power  of 
attorney  for  the  entire  firm  and  act  in  its  behalf,  to  the  depart- 
ment managers  and  their  assistants  under  whom  the  clerks  and 
machine  operators  and  others  work.  The  industrial  managers 
range  from  the  production  engineer  and  designer  at  the  top  to 
the  foremen  immediately  above  the  workmen  at  the  bottom.  The 
engineering  manager  and  technician  are  typically  subordinated 
to  the  business  and  financial  manager:  in  so  far  as  technical  and 
human  skills  are  used  in  the  modem  corporation  they  serve  the 
needs  of  the  business  side  of  the  corporation  as  judged  by  the 
business  manager.  The  engineering  manager,  recruited  from 
upper  middle-income  groups,  via  the  universities,  is  assisted  by 
lower  middle-income  people  with  some  technical  training  and 
long  experience. 

The  men  at  the  top  of  the  managerial  cadre  in  business  are 
formally  responsible  to  stockholders;  in  government,  to  the 
elected  politicians  and  through  them  to  the  people.  But  neither 
are  responsible  to  any  other  officials  or  managers;  that  is  what 
being  at  the  managerial  top  means.  Often  they  are  the  least  spe- 
cialized men  among  the  bosses;  the  'general  manager  is  well 
named.  Many  a  business  firm  is  run  by  men  whose  knowledge  is 
financial,  and  who  could  not  hold  down  a  job  as  factory  super- 
intendent, much  less  chief  engineer. 

Going  from  problem  to  problem  and  always  deciding,  like 
Tolstoy's  generals,  when  there  really  is  no  basis  for  decision  but 
only  the  machine's  need  for  command,  the  need  for  no  subordi- 
nate even  to  dream  the  chief  is  in  doubt— that  is  diJBFerent  from 
working  out  some  problem  alone  to  its  completion.  For  one  thing, 
an  appointment  schedule,  set  more  or  less  by  the  operation  of  the 
machine,  determines  the  content  and  rhythm  of  the  manager's 
time,  and  in  fact  of  his  life.  For  another,  he  hires  and  so  must 
feel  that  the  brains  of  others  belong  to  him,  because  he  knows 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  83 

how  to  use  them.  So  Monroe  Stahr,  Scott  Fitzgerald's  hero  in  The 
Last  Tycoon,  first  wanted  to  be  chief  clerk  of  the  works,  'the  one 
who  knows  where  everything  was,'  but  when  he  was  chief,  'found 
out  that  no  one  knew  where  anything  was.' 

Relations  between  men  in  charge  of  the  administrative 
branches  of  government  and  men  who  run  the  expanded  cor- 
porations and  unions  are  often  close.  Their  collaboration  may 
occur  while  each  is  an  official  of  his  respective  hierarchy,  or  by 
means  of  personal  shiftings  of  positions;  the  labor  leader  accepts 
a  government  job  or  becomes  the  personnel  man  of  a  corpora- 
tion; the  big-business  oflBcial  becomes  a  dollar-a-year  man;  the 
government  expert  accepts  a  position  with  the  corporation  his 
agency  is  attempting  to  regulate.  Just  how  close  the  resemblance 
between  governmental  and  business  officials  may  be  is  shown  by 
the  ease  and  frequency  with  which  men  pass  from  one  hierarchy 
to  another.  While  such  changes  may  seem  mere  incidents  in  an 
individual  career,  the  meaning  of  such  interpenetration  of  mana- 
gerial elite  goes  beyond  this,  modifying  the  meaning  of  the 
upper  brackets  and  the  objective  functions  of  the  several  big 
organizations. 

Higher  government  officials,  as  Reinhard  Bendix  has  suggested, 
probably  come  mostly  from  rural  areas  and  medium-size  towns, 
from  middle-class  and  lower  middle-class  families;  they  have 
worked  their  way  through  college  and  often  to  higher  educa- 
tional degrees.  Their  occupational  experience  prior  to  govern- 
ment work  is  usually  law,  business,  journalism,  or  college  teach- 
ing. In  line  with  general  occupational  shifts,  the  tendency  over 
the  last  generation  has  been  for  fewer  officials  to  come  from  farms 
and  more  from  professional  circles.  Except  perhaps  on  the  very 
highest  levels,  these  men  do  not  suffer  from  lack  of  incentive, 
as  compared  with  business  officials.  They  do,  however,  tend  to 
suffer  from  lack  of  those  privileges  of  income,  prestige,  and  secu- 
rity, which  many  of  them  believe  comparable  officials  in  large 
businesses  enjoy. 

The  officials  of  business  corporations  are  somewhat  older  than 
comparable  government  officials.  The  big  companies  do  not  yet 
have  what  experts  in  efficient  bureaucracy  would  call  an  ade- 
quate system  of  recruiting  for  management.  There  may  be  even 


84  WHITt  COLLAR  WORLDS 

more  'politics'  in  appointments  in  the  corporate  hierarchies  than 
in  Federal  Government  bureaus.  Among  bureau  heads  in  Wash- 
ington, for  instance,  by  1938  only  about  10  per  cent  were  simple 
political  appointees. 

Seniority,  of  course,  often  plays  a  large  part  in  promotions  to 
managerial  posts  in  both  hierarchies.  The  tenure  of  one  repre- 
sentative group  of  business  bureaucrats  was  about  20  years;  turn- 
over among  top  executives  of  large  corporations  is  typically  small. 
But  the  average  tenure  for  bureau  heads  in  the  federal  service, 
as  A.  W.  MacMahon  and  J.  D.  Millet  have  observed,  is  about  11 
years.  On  the  next  level  up  the  federal  hierarchies,  of  course,  the 
Secretaries  and  Under-secretaries  of  Departments  average  only 
from  three  to  five  years. 

The  upper  management  of  U.S.  business  may  be  recruited  from 
among  (1)  insiders  in  the  administrative  hierarchy;  (2)  insiders 
in  the  firm's  financial  or  clique  structure;  (3)  outsiders  who  have 
proved  themselves  able  at  managing  smaller  firms  and  are  thus 
viewed  as  promising  men  on  the  management  market;  or  (4) 
younger  outsiders,  fresh  from  technical  or  business  training,  who 
are  usually  taken  in  at  lower  levels  with  the  expectation  that 
their  promotion  will  be  unencumbered  and  rapid. 

To  the  extent  that  the  last  three  methods  of  recruitment  are 
followed,  the  advancement  chances  of  the  upper  middle  brackets 
of  the  cadre  are  diminished;  thus  they  typically  desire  the  first 
alternative  as  a  policy,  in  which  they  are  joined  by  most  person- 
nel advisers.  The  upper  middle  brackets  would  further  individual 
security  and  advancement  in  a  collective  way,  by  fair  and  equal 
chances'  being  guaranteed,  which  is  to  say  by  the  strict  bureauc- 
ratization of  the  management  field. 

Symptomatic  of  the  shift  from  entrepreneurship  to  bureau- 
cratic enterprise  in  business  is  the  manner  of  executive  compen- 
sation. In  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  where  owner  and 
manager  were  one,  net  profit  was  the  mode  of  compensation.  In 
the  white-collar  worlds,  the  top  manager  is  a  salaried  employee 
receiving  $25,000  to  $500,000  a  year.  With  increasing  bureaucrati- 
zation, annuities,  pensions,  and  retirement  plans  come  into  the 
picture  and  bonuses  based  on  profit  shares  fade  out. 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  85 

In  between  the  entrepreneurial  and  the  bureaucratic  mode  of 
payment  there  are  various  intermediary  forms,  many  of  them 
designed  to  maximize  incentive  and  to  beat  the  federal  tax.  Over 
the  last  quarter  of  a  century  taxes  have  become  big:  in  1947,  for 
instance,  the  $25,000-a-year-man  took  home  about  $17,000;  the 
$50,000-a-year-man  about  $26,000,  the  $150,000-a-y ear-man  about 
$45,000— this  from  salary,  not  counting  returns  from  property. 
Above  certain  levels,  money  as  such  loses  incentive  value;  its 
prestige  value  and  the  experience  of  success  for  which  it  is  a 
token  gain  as  incentives.  The  more  one  makes  the  more  one 
needs,  and  if  one  did  not  continue  to  make  money,  one  would 
experience  failure.  There  is  no  limit  to  the  game,  and  there  is  no 
way  out.  And  its  insecurities  are  unlimited.  So  heightened  can 
they  become  on  the  upper  income  levels  that  one  management 
consultant,  after  diligent  research,  has  plainly  stated  that  the 
high-paid  executive,  like  the  wage-worker  and  salaried  employee, 
has  security  at  the  center  of  his  dream-life.  To  the  manager,  ac- 
cording to  an  Elmo  Roper  siu^ey,  security  means  ( 1 )  a  position 
with  dignity;  (2)  a  rich  and  prompt  recognition  of  accomplish- 
ments; (3)  a  free  hand  to  do  as  he  wants  with  his  job  and  com- 
pany; and  (4)  plenty  of  leisure.  These  are  the  security  contents 
of  the  Big  Money,  which  combine,  as  is  appropriate  in  the  transi- 
tion era  of  corporate  business,  entrepreneurial  freedom  with  risk- 
less  bureaucratic  tenure. 

The  recruitment  of  a  loyal  managerial  staff  is  now  a  major  con- 
cern of  the  larger  businesses,  which  tend  toward  the  develop- 
ment of  'civil  service'  systems  for  single  large  corporations  and 
even  for  large  parts  of  entire  industries.  The  lag  in  putting  such 
bureaucratic  procedures  into  effect  occasions  much  urging  from 
more  'progressive'  corporation  officials. 

The  big  management  shortage,  the  consequent  load  of  mana- 
gerial work  during  the  Second  World  War,  and  the  boom  led  to 
many  formal  recruitment  and  training  plans.  Selected  men  are 
sent  to  courses  in  management  at  graduate  schools  of  Business 
Administration.  Rotation  training  systems  for  key  managerial  per- 
sonnel are  also  frequently  employed:  by  allowing  managers  to 
take  up  various  tasks  for  scheduled  brief  periods  of  time,  the  sys- 
tem fits  them  for  over-all  as  well  as  delimited  spheres  of  man- 


86  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

agement.  In  this  way  the  managerial  cadre  rationally  enlarges 
its  opportunity  for  a  secure  chance  by  seeing  the  whole  oper- 
ation in  detail;  by  definite  schedules,  the  experience  of  indi- 
vidual members  of  the  cadre  can  be  guided  and  the  grooming  of 
men  for  advancement  controlled.  The  management  cadre  itself 
is  being  rationalized  into  military-like  shape;  in  fact,  some  of  the 
very  best  ideas  for  business  management  have  come  from  men  of 
high  military  experience— the  'bureaucrats'  about  whom  business- 
men complained  so  during  the  war. 

Yet  this  increased  bureaucratic  training,  recruitment,  and  pro- 
motion does  not  extend  to  the  very  bottom  or  to  the  very  top 
of  the  business  hierarchies.  At  the  top,  especially,  those  who  run 
corporations  and  governments  are  the  least  bureaucratic  of  per- 
sonnel, for  above  a  certain  point  'political,'  'property,'  and  char- 
acter' qualifications  set  in  and  determine  who  shapes  policy  for 
the  entire  hierarchy.  It  is  in  the  middle  brackets  of  managers 
that  bureaucratic  procedures  and  styles  are  most  in  evidence. 

These  middle  managers  can  plan  only  limited  spheres  of  work; 
they  transmit  orders  from  above,  executing  some  with  their  staffs 
and  passing  on  others  to  those  below  them  for  execution. 

Although  the  middle  management  often  contains  the  most 
technically  specialized  men  in  the  enterprise,  their  skills  have 
become  less  and  less  material  techniques  and  more  and  more 
the  management  of  people.  This  is  true  even  though  super- 
vision has  been  both  intensified  and  diversified,  and  has  lost 
many  of  its  tasks  to  newer  specialists  in  personnel  work.  While 
engineers  take  over  the  maintenance  of  the  plant's  new  machin- 
ery, the  middle  managers  and  foremen  take  on  more  'personnel' 
controls  over  the  workers,  looking  more  often  to  the  personnel 
ofiice  than  to  the  engineering  headquarters. 

The  existence  of  middle  managers  indicates  a  further  separa- 
tion of  worker  from  owner  or  top  manager.  But  even  as  their 
functions  have  been  created,  the  middle  managers  have  had  their 
authority  stripped  from  them.  It  is  lost,  from  the  one  side,  as 
management  itself  becomes  rationalized  and,  from  the  other  side, 
as  lower-management  men,  such  as  foremen,  take  over  more  spe- 
cialized, less  authoritative  roles. 

The  middle  managers  do  not  count  for  very  much  in  the  larger 
world  beyond  their  individual  bureaucracies.  In  so  far  as  power 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  87 

in  connection  with  social  and  economic  change  is  concerned,  the 
important  group  within  the  managerial  strata  is  the  top  man- 
agers; in  so  far  as  numbers  are  concerned,  the  important  group 
is  the  foremen,  who  are  about  half  of  all  managers  (although 
less  than  1  per  cent  of  the  total  labor  force ) .  As  with  any  'middle' 
group,  what  happens  to  the  middle  managers  is  largely  dependent 
upon  what  happens  to  those  above  and  below  them— to  top  execu- 
tives and  to  foremen.  The  pace  and  character  of  work  in  the 
middle  management  are  coming  increasingly  to  resemble  those 
in  the  lower  ranks  of  the  management  hierarchy. 

3.  The  Case  of  the  Foreman 

Once  the  foreman,  representing  the  bottom  stratum  of  man- 
agement, was  everything  to  the  worker,  the  holder  of  his  'life 
and  future/  Industrial  disputes  often  seemed  disputes  between 
disgruntled  workmen  and  rawhiding  foremen;  and  yet  the  fore- 
man's position  was  aspired  to  by  the  workman.  The  close  rela- 
tions, favored  by  the  smaller  plant  and  town,  helped  make  for 
contentment,  even  though  the  foreman  held  the  first  line  of  de- 
fense for  management.  Having  a  monopoly  on  job  gratification, 
he  often  took  for  himself  any  feeling  of  achievement  to  which 
his  gang's  labor  might  lead;  he  solved  problems  and  overcame 
obstacles  for  the  men  laboring  below  him.  He  was  the  master 
craftsman:  he  knew  more  about  the  work  processes  than  any  of 
the  men  he  bossed.  Before  mass  production,  the  foreman  was 
works  manager  and  supervisor,  production  planner  and  personnel 
executive,  all  in  one. 

He  is  still  all  of  that  in  many  small  plants  and  in  certain  indus- 
tries that  have  no  technical  staff  and  few  oflBce  workers.  But  such 
plants  may  be  seen  historically  as  lags  and  their  foremen  as  pre- 
cursors of  modern  technical  and  supervisory  personnel. 

Of  all  occupational  strata,  in  fact,  none  has  been  so  grievously 
affected  by  the  rationalization  of  equipment  and  organization  as 
the  industrial  foreman.  With  the  coming  of  the  big  industry,  the 
foreman's  functions  have  been  diminished  from  above  by  the 
new  technical  and  human  agents  and  dictates  of  higher  manage- 
ment; from  below,  his  authority  has  been  undermined  by  the 
growth  of  powerful  labor  unions. 


88  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

Along  with  the  host  of  supervisory  assistants  and  new  kinds 
of  superiors  there  has  been  developed  in  many  industries  semi- 
automatic machinery  that  may  require  the  service  of  highly 
trained  technicians,  but  not  master  craftsmen.  With  such  machin- 
ery, Hans  Speier  has  observed,  the  foreman's  sphere  of  tech- 
nical competence  diminishes  and  his  skills  become  more  those  of 
the  personnel  agent  and  human  whip  than  of  the  master  crafts- 
man and  work  guide.  As  engineers  and  college-trained  techni- 
cians slowly  took  over,  the  foreman,  up  from  the  ranks,  had  to 
learn  to  take  orders  in  technical  matters.  In  many  industries  the 
man  who  could  nurse  semi-automatic  machines,  rather  than  boss 
gangs  of  workmen,  became  the  big  man  in  the  shop. 

The  experience  originally  earned  and  carried  by  the  foreman 
stratum  is  systematized,  then  centralized  and  rationally  redis- 
tributed. The  old  functions  of  the  foreman  are  no  longer  embod- 
ied in  any  one  man's  experience  but  in  a  team  and  in  a  rule  book. 
Each  staflF  innovation,  of  personnel  specialist,  safety  expert,  time- 
study  engineer,  diminishes  the  foreman's  authority  and  weak- 
ens the  respect  and  discipline  of  his  subordinates.  The  foreman 
is  no  longer  the  only  link  between  worker  and  higher  manage- 
ment, although,  in  the  eyes  of  both,  he  is  still  the  most  apparent 
link  in  the  elaborate  hierarchy  of  command  and  technique  be- 
tween front  oflBce  and  workshop. 

Authority,  Ernest  Dale  remarks,  'can  now  be  exercised  by  many 
foremen  only  in  consultation  with  numerous  other  authorities, 
and  the  resulting  interrelationships  are  often  ill-defined  and  dis- 
turbing.' The  foremen  exercise  authority  at  the  point  of  produc 
tion  but  they  are  not  its  final  source.  Often  they  exercise  an 
authority  of  social  dominance  without  superior  technical  com- 
petence. Their  sharing  of  authority,  and  thus  being  shorn  of  it, 
has  gone  far:  in  only  10  per  cent  of  the  companies  in  one  sample 
study  do  foremen  have  the  complete  right  to  discharge;  in  only 
14  per  cent,  the  absolute  right  to  make  promotions  within  their 
departments;  in  only  10  per  cent  the  complete  right  to  discipline. 
Only  20  per  cent  of  the  companies  hold  foremen's  meetings  or 
practice  any  form  of  active  consultation.  'The  foreman,'  con- 
cludes the  Slichter  panel  of  the  National  War  Labor  Board,  'is 
more  managed  than  managing,  more  and  more  an  executor  of 
other  men's  decisions,  less  and  less  a  maker  of  decisions  himself.' 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  89 

From  below,  the  foreman  has  lost  authority  with  the  men,  who 
are  themselves  often  powerful  in  their  union.  Men  who  used  to 
go  to  their  foremen  with  grievances  now  go  to  their  union. 
Foremen  complain  about  union  stewards,  who  frequentiy  accom- 
plish more  for  the  subordinate  than  the  foreman  can.  Stewards 
are  said  by  foremen  to  be  independent:  'We  are  unable  to  make 
the  stewards  do  anything.  .  .  They  challenge  even  our  limited 
authority.'  The  unions  can  do  something  about  the  rank-and-file's 
problems;  in  fact,  the  unions  have  in  some  shops  got  benefits  for 
the  men  once  enjoyed  only  by  foremen,  including  increased 
security  of  the  job.  Originating  typically  in  the  working  ranks, 
the  foreman  is  no  longer  of  them,  socially  or  politically.  He  may 
be  jealous  of  union  picnics  and  parties,  and  he  is  socially  isolated 
from  higher  management. 

The  foreman's  anxiety  springs  from  the  fact  that  the  union 
looks  after  the  workmen;  the  employer  is  able  to  look  after  him- 
self; but  who  will  look  after  the  foreman? 

Having  arisen  from  the  ranks  of  labor,  he  often  cannot  expect 
to  go  higher  because  he  is  not  college-trained.  By  1910  it  was 
being  pointed  out  in  management  literature  that  if  the  manager, 
in  his  search  for  dependable  subordinates,  turns  to  a  'former  sub- 
ordinate or  fellow  worker,  he  finds  that  they  are  attached  too 
much  to  the  old  regime  and  can't  do  the  job  well.  In  this  dilemma, 
he  will  turn  to  the  technically  educated  young  man.  The  em- 
ployer [not  technically  educated]  sneers  at  and  yet  respects  this 
man.'  Today,  only  21  per  cent  of  the  foremen  under  40  years  of 
age,  and  17  per  cent  over  40,  believe  they  will  ever  get  above  the 
foreman  level.  No  longer  belonging  to  labor,  not  'one  of  the  boys 
in  the  union,'  the  foreman  is  not  secure  in  management  either, 
not  of  it  socially  and  educationally.  'The  snobbery  of  executive 
management  is  his  pet  peeve  and  the  chief  cause  of  his  com- 
plaining.' Foremen  are  older  than  the  run-of-the-mill  workers 
under  them;  they  are  more  often  settled  and  have  larger  fam- 
ilies. These  facts  limit  their  mobility  and  perhaps  to  some  extent 
their  courage.  Hans  Speier  has  even  asserted,  on  the  basis  of  such 
factors,  that  'political  opportunism'  is  'the  outstanding  charac- 
teristic of  the  foreman.' 

During  the  late  'thirties  and  the  war,  standing  thus  in  the 
middle,  a  traflBc  cop  of  industrial  relations,  with  each  side  expect- 


90  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

ing  him  to  give  its  signals,  the  foreman  became  the  object  of 
both  union  and  management  propaganda.  Even  though  foremen 
are  no  longer  master  craftsmen  and  work-guides  as  of  old,  they 
are  still  seen  by  management  as  key  men,  not  so  much  in  their 
technical  roles  in  the  work  process  as  in  their  roles  in  the  social 
organization  of  the  factory.  It  is  in  keeping  with  the  managerial 
demiurge  and  the  changed  nature  of  the  foreman's  role  that  he 
is  led  into  the  ways  of  manipulation.  He  is  to  develop  discipline 
and  loyalty  among  the  workers  by  using  his  own  personality  as 
the  main  tool  of  persuasion. 

He  must  be  trained  as  a  loyal  leader  embodying  managerially 
approved  opinions.  'Under  present-day  techniques  the  foreman 
is  chosen  for  his  skillfulness  in  handling  personnel— rather  than 
because  of  length-of-service  or  mastery  of  the  particular  opera- 
tion in  his  charge.  .  .  Getting  along  with  people  is  80  per  cent 
of  the  modern  foreman's  job.'  Recruitment  officers  and  personnel 
directors  are  advised  to  consider  the  prospective  foreman's  fam- 
ily and  social  life  along  with  his  formal  education  and  shop 
ability.  The  prime  requisite  is  a  rounded,  well-adjusted  person- 
ality; foremen  must  'always  be  the  same'  in  their  relations  with 
people— which  means  'leaving  your  personal  troubles  at  home, 
and  being  just  as  approachable  and  amiable  on  a  "bad  day"  as 
on  a  good  one.' 

All  manner  of  personal  traits  and  behaviors  are  blandly  sug- 
gested to  foremen  as  indispensable.  'The  essential  quality  of 
friendliness  is  sincerity.  .  .  They  should  memorize,  from  the  per- 
sonnel records,  the  following  about  all  the  members  of  their  de- 
partment: first  name;  if  married,  whether  husband  or  wife  works 
in  the  plant;  approximate  ages  and  school  grades  of  children  ,  .  . 
etc'  From  local  newspapers  'he  will  learn  such  valuable  items  as: 
accidents;  births;  deaths;  children's  activities;  participation  in 
Red  Cross,  YMCA  .  .  .  wedding  anniversaries;  parties;  recitals.' 
'The  orientation  of  new  recruits  off^ers  a  real  opportunity  to  win 
the  friendship  and  loyalty  of  the  new  worker.'  'The  manner  of 
speech  of  the  foreman  during  even  a  minor  conversation  is  per- 
haps more  important  than  what  he  says.  .  .  Good  listening 
habits  are  a  must.  .  .  He  should  fine  himself  10  cents  for  every 
fall  from  grace.  .  .  He  needs  a  pleasant,  clear  voice  [test  re- 
cordings   are    recommended].  .  .  The    words    "definitely"    and 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  91 

"absolutely"  are  taboo.  .  .  His  own  prejudices  must  be  "parked" 
outside  the  plant.'  Higher  managers  who  cannot  yet  grasp  the 
point  should  recognize  that  such  human  engineering  is  capable 
of  reducing  the  'hourly  cost  of  1.2  hours  of  direct  labor  cost 
per  pound  of  fabricated  aircraft  to  .7  hour  per  pound  within 
an  18  month  period.' 

To  secure  the  foreman's  allegiance,  management  has  show- 
ered attention  upon  him.  In  return,  management  has  written 
into  its  rule  book  for  foremen:  'Solidarity  with  his  class,  which 
is  of  course  the  middle  management  group,  is  owed  to  his  fel- 
lows by  every  foreman.'  'What  needs  to  be  demonstrated  is  that 
executive  and  supervisory  management  are  one.  Their  interests 
must  not  be  divided  and  their  only  difference  is  that  of  function 
within  management.' 

Realizing  management's  exploitation  of  their  developing  inse- 
curities, younger  union-conscious  foremen  have  attempted  to 
rejoin  the  men,  have  tried  to  form  unions.  The  unions  that 
began  under  the  Wagner  Act,  in  the  'forties,  soon  found  them- 
selves caught  between  the  antagonism  of  organized  labor  and 
the  indifference  of  management.  Probably  not  more  than  100,000 
foremen  were  directly  committed  to  unions  under  the  Wagner 
Act.  During  the  Second  World  War,  foreman  unionization  took 
on  impetus,  for  foremen  who  had  to  train  some  8  million  green 
workers  began  to  feel  their  mettle  and  to  search  for  a  means 
of  asserting  it.  Yet  out  of  an  estimated  one  to  one-and-a-half 
million  foremen  in  the  United  States,  the  Foreman's  Association, 
founded  in  Detroit  in  1941,  had  at  its  peak  only  50,000  or  5  per 
cent.  Even  these  small  beginnings  were  beset  by  legal  confu- 
sion, and  have  certainly  proved  no  solution. 

4.  The  New  Entrepreneur 

Balzac  called  bureaucracy  'the  giant  power  wielded  by  pyg- 
mies,' but  actually  not  all  the  men  who  wield  bureaucratic  con- 
trol are  appropriately  so  termed.  Modern  observers  without 
first-hand  or  sensitive  experience  in  bureaucracies  tend,  first,  to 
infer  types  of  bureaucrats  from  the  ideal-type  definition  of  bu- 
reaucracy, rather  than  to  examine  the  various  executive  adap- 
tations to  the  enlarged  enterprise  and  centralized  bureau;  and, 


92  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

second,  to  assume  that  big  businesses  are  strictly  bureaucratic 
in  form.  Such  businesses  are,  in  fact,  usually  mixtures,  espe- 
cially as  regards  personnel,  of  bureaucratic,  patrimonial,  and 
entrepreneurial  forms  of  organization.  This  means,  in  brief, 
that  politics'  (as  well  as  administration)  is  very  much  at  work 
in  selecting  and  forming  types  of  managers. 

There  are  in  the  modern  enterprise  men  who  fulfil  the  bureau- 
cratic formula;  in  brief,  here  is  how  they  look  and  act: 

They  follow  clearly  defined  lines  of  authority,  each  of  which 
is  related  to  other  lines,  and  all  related  to  the  understood  pur- 
poses of  the  enterprise  as  a  going  concern.  Their  activities  and 
feelings  are  within  delimited  spheres  of  action,  set  by  the  obli- 
gations and  requirements  of  their  own  'expertese.'  Their  power 
is  neatly  seated  in  the  oflBce  they  occupy  and  derived  only  from 
that  office;  all  their  relations  within  the  enterprise  are  thus  im- 
personal and  set  by  the  formal  hierarchical  structure.  Their  ex- 
pectations are  on  a  thoroughly  calculable  basis,  and  are  en- 
forced by  the  going  rules  and  explicit  sanctions;  their  appoint- 
ment is  by  examination,  or,  at  least,  on  the  basis  of  trained-for 
competencies;  and  they  are  vocationally  secure,  with  expected 
life  tenure,  and  a  regularized  promotion  scheme. 

Such  a  description  is,  of  course,  a  rational  caricature,  although 
useful  as  a  guide  to  observation.  There  are,  in  fact,  two  sorts  of 
managers  whose  personal  adaptations  most  closely  approximate 
the  'bureaucratic'  type.  At  the  top  of  some  hierarchies,  one  often 
notices  personalities  who  are  calm  and  sober  and  unhurried, 
but  who  betray  a  lack  of  confidence.  They  are  often  glum  men 
who  display  a  great  importance  of  manner,  seemingly  have  little 
to  do,  and  act  with  slow  deliberation.  They  reduce  the  hazards 
of  personal  decision  by  carefully  following  the  rules,  and  are 
heavily  burdened  by  anxiety  if  decisions  not  covered  by  previ- 
ous rule  are  forced  upon  them.  They  are  carefully  protected 
from  the  world-to-be-impressed  by  subordinates  and  secretaries 
who  are  working  around  them;  they  are  men  who  have  things 
done  for  them.  Liking  the  accoutrements  of  authority,  they  are 
always  in  line  with  the  aims  of  the  employer  or  other  higher 
ups;  the  ends  of  the  organization  become  their  private  ends.  For 
they  are  selected  by  and  act  for  the  owners  or  the  political  boss. 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  93 

as  safe  and  sound  men  with  moderate  ambitions,  carefully  held 
within  the  feasible  and  calculable  lines  of  the  laid-out  career. 
That  is  why  they  are  at  the  top  and  that  is  the  point  to  be  made 
about  them:  they  are  cautiously  selected  to  represent  the  formal 
interest  of  the  enterprise  and  its  organizational  integrity:  they 
serve  that  organization  and,  in  doing  so,  they  serve  their  own 
personal  interests.  Among  all  the  apparatus,  they  sit  cautiously, 
and  after  giving  the  appearance  of  weighty  pondering  usually 
say  No. 

Often  identical  with  this  bureaucratic  type,  but  usually  lower 
down  the  hierarchy  of  safety,  are  'the  old  veterans.'  They  are 
men  who  say  they  started  in  the  business  when  it  was  small, 
or  in  some  other  small  business  now  a  division  of  the  big  one. 
They  follow  instructions,  feeling  insecure  outside  the  bounds 
of  explicit  orders,  keeping  out  of  the  limelight  and  passing  the 
buck.  Usually  they  feel  a  disproportion  between  their  abilities 
and  their  experience,  and  having  come  to  feel  that  competition 
is  without  yield,  often  become  pedantic  in  order  to  get  a  much- 
craved  deference.  Carefully  attending  to  formalities  with  their 
co-workers  and  with  the  public,  they  strive  for  additional  def- 
erence by  obedience  to  rule.  They  sentimentalize  the  formal 
aspects  of  their  oflSce  and  feel  that  their  personal  security  is 
threatened  by  anything  that  would  detach  them  from  their 
present  setting. 

But  there  are  other  types  of  managers  who  are  adapted  to 
bureaucratic  life,  but  who  are  by  no  means  bureaucrats  in  the 
accepted  image.  The  bureaucratic  ethos  is  not  the  only  content 
of  managerial  personalities.  In  particular,  bureaucracies  today 
in  America  are  vanguard  forms  of  life  in  a  culture  still  domi- 
nated by  a  more  entrepreneurial  ethos  and  ideology.  Among 
the  younger  managers,  two  types  display  a  blend  of  entrepre- 
neurial and  bureaucratic  traits.  One  is  the  'live-wire'  who  usu- 
ally comes  up  from  the  sales  or  promotion  side  of  the  business, 
and  who  represents  a  threat  to  those  above  him  in  the  hier- 
archy, especially  the  old  veterans,  although  sometimes  also  to 
the  glum  men.  It  may  be  that  in  due  course  the  live-wire  will 
settle  down;  occasionally  one  does  settle  down,  becomes  some- 
body's 'bright  boy,'  somebody  else's  live-wire  who  is  then  liked 


94  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

and  favored  by  those  whom  he  serves.  If  his  loyalty  is  unques- 
tionable, and  he  is  careful  not  to  arouse  anxieties  by  his  bright- 
ness, he  is  on  the  road  to  the  top. 

Some  live-wires,  however,  do  not  readily  become  somebody's 
bright  boy:  they  become  what  we  may  call  New  Entrepre- 
neurs, a  type  that  deserves  detailed  discussion. 

The  dominating  fact  of  the  new  business  setting  is  the  busi- 
ness bureaucracy  and  the  managerial  supplementation,  or  even 
replacement,  of  the  owner-operator.  But  bureaucratization  has 
not  completely  replaced  the  spirit  of  competition.  While  the 
agents  of  the  new  style  of  competition  are  not  exactly  old-fash- 
ioned heroes,  neither  are  conditions  old-fashioned.  Initiative  is 
being  put  to  an  unexampled  test. 

In  a  society  so  recently  emerged  from  the  small-entrepreneur 
epoch,  still  influenced  by  models  of  success  congruent  with  that 
epoch's  ideology,  it  is  not  likely  that  the  sober-bureaucratic 
type  can  readily  become  dominant.  Yet  the  structure  of  the 
society  will  not  permit  the  traditional  way  of  amassing  personal 
wealth.  The  nineteenth-century  scene  of  competition  was  one 
of  relatively  equal  powers  and  the  competition  was  between 
individual  businessmen  or  firms.  The  twentieth- century  scene 
contains  huge  and  powerful  units  which  compete  not  so  much 
with  one  another  but  as  a  totality  with  the  consuming  public 
and  sometimes  with  certain  segments  of  the  government.  The 
new  entrepreneur  represents  the  old  go-getting  competition  in 
the  new  setting. 

The  general  milieu  of  this  new  species  of  entrepreneur  is 
those  areas  that  are  still  uncertain  and  unroutinized.  The  new 
entrepreneur  is  very  much  at  home  in  the  less  tangible  of  the 
'business  services'— commercial  research  and  public  relations, 
advertising  agencies,  labor  relations,  and  the  mass  communica- 
tion and  entertainment  industries.  His  titles  are  likely  to  be 
'special  assistant  to  the  president,'  'counsel  for  the  general  man- 
ager,' 'management  counsellor  and  engineering  adviser.'  For 
the  bright,  young,  educated  man,  these  fields  offer  limitless 
opportunities,  if  he  only  has  the  initiative  and  the  know-how, 
and  if  only  the  anxieties  of  the  biu-eaucratic  chieftains  hold  up. 


THE  AAANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  95 

The  new  entrepreneur  may  in  time  routinize  these  fields,  but, 
in  the  process  of  doing  so,  he  operates  in  them. 

The  areas  open  to  the  new  entrepreneur,  usually  overlapping 
in  various  ways,  are  those  of  great  uncertainties  and  new  begin- 
nings: (1)  adjustments  between  various  business  bureaucracies, 
and  between  business  and  government;  (2)  public  relations, 
the  interpretative  justification  of  the  new  powers  to  the  under- 
lying outsiders;  and  (3)  new  industries  that  have  arisen  in  the 
last  quarter-century,  especially  those— for  example,  advertising 
—which  involve  selling  somewhat  intangible  services. 

The  old  entrepreneur  succeeded  by  founding  a  new  concern 
and  expanding  it.  The  bureaucrat  gets  a  forward-looking  job  and 
climbs  up  the  ladder  within  a  pre-arranged  hierarchy.  The  new 
entrepreneur  makes  a  zig-zag  pattern  upward  within  and  be- 
tween established  bureaucracies.  In  contrast  to  the  classic  small 
businessman,  who  operated  in  a  world  opening  up  like  a  row 
of  oysters  under  steam,  the  new  entrepreneur  must  operate  in  a 
world  in  which  all  the  pearls  have  already  been  grabbed  up  and 
are  carefully  guarded.  The  only  way  in  which  he  can  express  his 
initiative  is  by  servicing  the  powers  that  be,  in  the  hope  of  get- 
ting his  cut.  He  serves  them  by  'fixing  things,'  between  one  big 
business  and  another,  and  between  business  as  a  whole  and  the 
public. 

He  gets  ahead  because  (1)  men  in  power  do  not  expect  that 
things  can  be  done  legitimately;  (2)  these  men  know  fear  and 
guilt;  and  (3)  they  are  often  personally  not  very  bright.  It  is 
often  hard  to  say,  with  any  sureness,  whether  the  new  entrepre- 
neur lives  on  his  own  wits,  or  upon  the  lack  of  wits  in  others. 
As  for  anxiety,  however,  it  is  certain  that,  although  he  may  be 
prodded  by  his  own,  he  could  get  nowhere  without  its  ample 
presence  in  his  powerful  clients. 

Like  Balzac's  des  Lupeaulx,  thrown  up  by  the  tide  of  political 
events  in  France  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
who  had  discovered  that  'authority  stood  in  need  of  a  char- 
woman,' the  American  new  entrepreneur  is  an  'adroit  climber 
...  to  his  professions  of  useful  help  and  go-between  he  added 
a  third— he  gave  gratuitous  advice  on  the  internal  diseases  of 
power.  .  .  He  bore  the  brunt  of  the  first  explosion  of  despair  or 
anger;  he  laughed  and  mourned  with  his  chief.  .  .  It  was  his 


96  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

duty  to  flatter  and  advise,  to  give  advice  in  the  guise  of  flattery, 
and  flattery  in  the  form  of  advice.' 

The  talent  and  intelligence  that  go  with  the  new  entrepreneur- 
ship  are  often  dangerous  in  the  new  society.  He  who  has  them 
but  lacks  power  must  act  as  if  those  in  power  have  the  same 
capacities.  He  must  give  credit  for  good  ideas  to  his  superiors 
and  take  the  rap  himself  for  bad  ones.  The  split  between  the 
executive  who  judges  and  the  intelligence  that  creates  is  sharp 
and  finds  a  ready  justification:  'So  I  write  a  show?  Or  produce 
one?'  asks  an  account  executive  in  one  of  the  recent  tales  of  un- 
happiness  among  the  new  entrepreneurs.  'And  I  take  it  down  to 
[the]  sponsor.  And  he  asks  me,  in  your  judgment  should  I  spend 
a  million  dollars  a  year  on  this  show  you've  created?  See,  Artie? 
Actually,  I'd  have  no  judgment.  I  wouldn't  be  in  a  position  to 
criticize.  In  short,  I  wouldn't  be  an  executive.' 

As  a  competitor,  the  new  entrepreneur  is  an  agent  of  the  bu- 
reaucracy he  serves,  and  what  he  competes  for  is  the  good  will 
and  favor  of  those  who  run  the  system;  his  chance  exists  because 
there  are  several  bureaucracies,  private  and  pubHc,  in  compli- 
cated entanglements.  Unlike  the  little  white-collar  man,  he  does 
not  often  stay  within  any  one  corporate  bureaucracy;  his  path 
is  within  and  between  bureaucracies,  in  a  kind  of  uneasy  but 
calculated  rhythm.  He  makes  a  well-worn  path  between  big 
business  and  the  regulatory  agencies  of  the  Federal  Government, 
especially  its  military  establishment  and  political  parties. 

On  the  higher  managerial  levels  there  is  a  delicate  balance  of 
power,  security,  and  advancement  resting  upon  a  sensitive  blend 
of  loyalty  to  one's  firm  and  knowledge  of  its  intimately  valuable 
secrets— secrets  which  other  firms  or  governments  would  like  to 
know.  Not  'secrets'  in  any  hush-hush  sense,  although  there  have 
been  simple  sell-outs,  but  secrets  in  the  sense  of  what  is  inacces- 
sible to  those  who  have  not  operated  in  the  context.  In  a  bureau- 
cratic world,  the  individual's  experience  is  usually  controlled; 
the  clever  executive  squashes  entrepreneurial  tendencies  by  using 
his  formal  power  position  to  monopolize  contacts  with  important 
cUents.  It  is  a  characteristic  of  the  new  entrepreneur  that  he 
manages  to  gain  experience  without  being  controlled. 

There  are  many  instances  of  men  who  learn  the  secrets  and 
procedures  of  a  regulatory  agency  of  government  to  which  they 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  97 

are  not  loyal  in  a  career  sense.  Their  loyalties  are  rather  to  the 
business  hierarchy  to  which  they  intend  to  return.  This  is  the 
structure  of  one  type  of  twentieth-century  opportunity.  The  cur- 
riculum of  such  'businessmen  in  government'  is  familiar:  they 
have  been  in  and  out  of  Washington  since  the  NIRA  days,  serv- 
ing on  advisory  boards,  in  commerce  department  committees  and 
war  production  boards,  retaining  contact  with  a  middle  or  large- 
scale  business  enterprise.  In  this  interlinked  world,  there  has 
been  genuine  opportunity  for  big  success  over  the  last  fifteen 
years. 

The  openings  have  been  on  all  levels.  On  the  lower  levels,  a 
chief  clerk  of  an  OPA  board  may  set  up  a  business  service— an 
OPA  buffer— for  firms  dealing  with  OPA,  and  slowly  grow  into 
a  management  counselling  service.  At  the  center,  however,  opera- 
tions have  gone  on  in  a  big  way  during  and  after  the  war.  Sur- 
plus-property disposal,  for  example,  became  so  complicated  that 
'the  government'  wasn't  sure  just  what  it  was  doing.  The  surface 
has  only  been  scratched,  but  evidence  has  been  published  of 
millions  being  made  from  investments  of  thousands;  of  expe- 
diters buying  surplus  tools  from  the  government  and  selling 
them  back  again;  of  buying  from  the  Navy  and  immediately  sell- 
ing to  the  Army,  et  cetera.  A  few  smaller  fry  have  been  caught; 
the  big  fixers  probably  never  will  be,  for  they  were  only  carry- 
ing on  business  as  usual  during  wartime  and  with  the  govern- 
ment. 

Perhaps  the  Number  One  figure  in  the  short  history  of  the  new 
entrepreneur  has  been  Thomas  Gardner  ( 'Tommy-the-Cork' ) 
Corcoran,  who  for  two  terms  was  one  of  President  Roosevelt's 
'principal  advisers  and  .  .  .  trouble  shooters.  .  .  He  possessed 
that  rare  asset,  either  inside  or  outside  of  the  Federal  Govern- 
ment, of  knowing  the  whole,  intricate  mechanism  of  the  Washing- 
ton establishment.'  A  free-ranging  talent  scout  for  the  administra- 
tion, he  was,  as  John  H.  Crider  of  the  New  York  Times  puts  it, 
'personally  responsible  for  putting  literally  scores  of  men  in  key 
positions  throughout  the  Federal  organization.  .  .  He  has  more 
pipelines  into  the  Government  than  probably  any  other  indi- 
vidual on  the  outside.  .  .  He  always  operated  for  the  President 
behind  *:he  scenes,  having  had  several  titles  during  his  govern- 
ment employment,  including  counsel  .  .  .  assistant  .  .  .  special 


98  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

assistant.'  Leaving  the  government  service  v^^hich  paid  him  only 
$10,000  a  year,  he  earned  as  lawyer  and  expeditor  $100,000  plus. 

For  the  'fixer,'  who  lives  on  the  expectation  that  in  the  bureau- 
cratic world  things  cannot  be  accomplished  quickly  through  legit- 
imate channels,  bargaining  power  and  sources  of  income  consist 
of  intangible  contacts  and  'pipe-lines'  rather  than  tangible  assets. 
Yet  he  is  no  less  an  entrepreneur  in  spirit  and  style  of  operation 
than  the  man  of  small  property;  he  is  using  his  own  initiative, 
wile,  and  cunning  to  create  something  where  nothing  was  before. 
Of  course,  he  does  not  have  the  security  that  property  ownership 
once  provided;  that  is  one  thing  that  makes  Sammy  run.  Yet,  for 
the  successful,  the  risks  are  not  incommensurate  with  the  returns. 

Sometimes,  of  course,  the  new  entrepreneur  does  become  a 
member  of  the  propertied  rich.  He  can  scatter  his  property  in 
various  stocks  in  a  sensible  attempt  to  spread  risks  and  concen- 
trate chances  of  success.  If  he  does  not  invest  capital,  his  success 
is  all  the  greater  measure  of  his  inherent  worth,  for  this  means 
that  he  is  genuinely  creative.  Like  the  more  heroic  businessmen 
of  old,  he  manages  to  get  something  for  very  little  or  nothing. 
And  like  them,  he  is  a  man  who  never  misses  a  bet. 

The  power  of  the  old  captain  of  industry  purportedly  rested 
upon  his  engineering  ability  and  his  financial  sharp  dealing.  The 
power  of  the  ideal  bureaucrat  is  derived  from  the  authority 
vested  in  the  office  he  occupies.  The  power  of  the  managerial 
chieftain  rests  upon  his  control  of  the  wealth  piled  up  by  the  old 
captain  and  is  increased  by  a  rational  system  of  guaranteed 
tributes.  The  power  of  the  new  entrepreneur,  in  the  first  instance 
at  least,  rests  upon  his  personality  and  upon  his  skill  in  using  it 
to  manipulate  the  anxieties  of  the  chieftain.  The  concentration 
of  power  has  thus  modified  the  character  and  the  larger  meaning 
of  competition.  The  new  entrepreneur's  success  or  failure  is  de- 
cided not  so  much  by  the  'supply  and  demand'  of  the  impersonal 
market  as  by  the  personal  anxieties  and  decisions  of  intimately 
known  chieftains  of  monopoly. 

The  careers  of  both  the  new  entrepreneur  and  the  ordinary 
white-collar  worker  are  administered  by  powerful  others.  But 
tl.ere  is  this  difference:  the  toadying  of  the  white-collar  employee 
is  small-scale  and  unimaginative;  he  is  a  member  of  the  stable 
corps  of  the  bureaucracy,  and  initiative  is  regimented  out  of  his 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  99 

life.  The  new  ulcered  entrepreneur  operates  on  the  guileful  edges 
of  the  several  bureaucracies. 

With  his  lavish  expense  account,  the  new  entrepreneur  some- 
times gets  into  the  public  eye  as  a  fixer— along  with  the  respec- 
table businessman  whose  work  he  does— or  even  as  an  upstart 
and  a  crook:  for  the  same  public  that  idolizes  initiative  becomes 
incensed  when  it  finds  a  grand  model  of  success  based  simply 
and  purely  upon  it.  For  one  Murray  Garsson  caught  how  many 
others  were  there?  The  Garssons  ran  a  letterhead  corporation 
title  into  a  profit  of  78  million  dollars  out  of  war  contracts, 
and  the  same  public  that  honors  pluck  and  success  and  the 
Horatio  Alger  story  became  angry.  In  an  expanding  system, 
profits  seem  to  coincide  with  the  welfare  of  all;  in  a  system 
already  closed,  profits  are  made  by  doing  somebody  in.  The  line 
between  the  legitimate  and  the  illegitimate  is  diSicult  to  draw 
because  no  one  has  set  up  the  rules  for  the  new  situation.  More- 
over, such  moral  questions  are  decisively  influenced  by  the  size 
of  the  business  and  the  firmness  and  reliability  of  contacts. 

Part  of  the  new  entrepreneur's  frenzy  perhaps  is  due  to  appre- 
hension that  his  function  may  disappear.  Many  of  the  jobs  he 
has  been  doing  for  the  chieftains  are  now  a  standardized  part 
of  business  enterprise,  no  longer  requiring  the  entrepreneurial 
flair,  and  can  be  handled  by  cheaper  and  more  dependable  white- 
collar  men.  Increasingly,  big  firms  hire  their  own  talent  for  those 
fields  in  which  the  new  entrepreneurs  pioneered.  In  so  far  as  this 
is  so,  the  new  entrepreneurs  become  bright  boys  and,  as  salaried 
employees,  are  stable  members  of  the  managerial  cadre. 

In  the  more  strictly  bureaucratic  setting,  the  value  of  contacts 
a  given  manager  has  and  the  secrets  he  learns  are  definitely  les- 
sened. Rationalization  of  the  managerial  hierarchy  decreases  the 
chance  for  any  one  man  down  the  line  to  get  a  view  of  the  whole. 
It  is  the  Tommy  Corcoran  without  a  definite  bureaucratic  role 
who  learns  the  whole,  and  serves  his  chief— and  in  due  course 
himself— by  telling  selected  others  about  it.  In  the  General  Somer- 
vell type  of  managership,  the  executive's  control  section  monopo- 
lizes the  chance  to  see  things  whole,  and  tells  what  it  will  once 
each  month  to  all  executives. 


100  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

Rationalization  prohibits  a  total  view:  by  rationalizing  the 
organization  via  rotation  systems  and  control  sections,  top  bu- 
reaucrats can  guide  the  vision  of  underlings.  The  'entrepreneurial 
type'  who  does  not  play  ball  can  be  excluded  from  inside  infor- 
mation. Like  the  commodity  market  before  it,  the  top  level  of 
the  personality  market  may  well  become  an  object  to  be  adminis- 
tered, rather  than  a  play  of  free  forces  of  crafty  wile  and  unex- 
ampled initiative. 

5.  The  Power  of  the  Managers 

There  is  no  doubt  that  managers  of  big  business  have  replaced 
captains  of  industry  as  the  ostensibly  central  figures  in  modern 
capitalism.  They  are  the  economic  elite  of  the  new  society;  they 
are  the  men  who  have  the  most  of  whatever  there  is  to  have; 
the  men  in  charge  of  things  and  of  other  men,  who  make  the 
large-scale  plans.  They  are  the  high  bosses,  the  big  money,  the 
great  say-so.  But,  in  fact,  the  'top'  of  modem  business  is  compli- 
cated: alongside  top  corporation  executives  are  scattered  throngs 
of  owners  and,  below  them,  the  upper  hierarchies  of  managerial 
employees. 

As  modern  businesses  have  become  larger,  the  ownership  of 
any  given  enterprise  has  expanded  and  the  power  of  'the  owners' 
in  direct  operation  has  declined.*  The  power  of  property  within 
plant,  firm,  and  political  economy  has  often  become  indirect, 
and  works  through  a  host  of  new  agents.  The  owners  of  property 
do  not  themselves  give  commands  to  their  workmen:  there  are 
too  many  workmen  and  not  enough  concentrated  owners.  More- 
over, even  if  personal  command  were  technically  possible,  it  is 
more  convenient  to  hire  others  for  this  purpose.  Adam  Smith, 
writing  even  before  the  'proprietor's  liability'  was  limited,  as- 
serted: 'The  greater  part  of  the  proprietors  seldom  pretend  to 
understand  anything  of  the  business  of  the  company  .  .  .  give 
themselves  no  trouble  about  it,  but  received  contentedly  each 

*  Owners  are  people  who  legally  claim  a  share  of  profits  and  expect 
that  those  who  operate  the  enterprise  will  act  for  their  best  interests. 
Managers  are  people  who  have  operating  control  over  the  enterprise, 
the  ones  who  run  it. 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  101 

half-yearly  or  yearly  dividend  as  the  directors  think  proper  to 
make  them.' 

The  facts  of  the  split  of  manager  and  owner,  and  the  indirect 
power  of  the  owner,  have  long  been  known.  Such  facts,  however, 
since  at  least  the  beginning  of  this  century,  have  been  widely 
and  erroneously  taken  to  mean  that  'a  managerial  revolution'  has 
been  and  is  under  way  and  that  big  management,  replacing  big 
property,  is  slated  to  be  the  next  ruling  class. 

While  owner  and  manager  are  no  longer  the  same  person,  the 
manager  has  not  expropriated  the  owner,  nor  has  the  power  of 
the  propertied  enterprise  over  workers  and  markets  declined. 
Power  has  not  been  split  from  property;  rather  the  power  of 
property  is  more  concentrated  than  is  its  ownership.  If  this  seems 
undemocratic,  the  lack  of  democracy  is  within  the  propertied 
classes.  If  the  Van  Sweringen  brothers  controlled  8  railroads 
worth  $2  billion  with  only  $20  million,  still  there  was  the  $20 
million,  and  the  power  they  exercised  was  power  made  possible 
by  the  $2  billion. 

The  powers  of  property  ownership  are  depersonalized,  inter- 
mediate, and  concealed.  But  they  have  not  been  minimized  nor 
have  they  declined.  Much  less  has  any  revolution  occurred, 
managerial  or  otherwise,  involving  the  legitimations  of  the  insti- 
tution of  private  property.  Under  the  owners  of  property  a  huge 
and  complex  bureaucracy  of  business  and  industry  has  come  into 
existence.  But  the  right  to  this  chain  of  command,  the  legitimate 
access  to  the  position  of  authority  from  which  these  bureauc- 
racies are  directed,  is  the  right  of  property  ownership.  The  stock- 
holder is  neither  willing  nor  able  to  exercise  operating  control 
of  his  ownership.  That  is  true.  And  the  power  of  the  managers 
is  not  dependent  upon  their  own  personal  ownership.  That  is  also 
true.  But  it  cannot  be  concluded  that  there  is  no  functional  rela- 
tion between  ownership  and  control  of  large  corporations.  Such 
an  inference  focuses  upon  personnel  issues  instead  of  legitima- 
tions and  institutions. 

Property  as  a  going  concern  means  that  the  owner  may,  if 
necessary,  employ  violent  coercion  against  those  who  do  not  own 
but  would  use.  With  legal  ownership,  one  may  borrow  the  police 
force  to  oust  and  to  punish  anyone,  including  former  owners  and 
all  their  managers  as  well  as  non-owners,  who  tries  to  seize  con- 


102  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

trol  of  property.  Even  if  it  were  true  that  the  power  of  'the 
owners'  had  been  expropriated  by  the  managers,  this  would  not 
mean  that  their  property  has  been  expropriated.  Any  owner 
who  can  prove  any  case  of  'expropriation'  of  property  by  any 
manager  can  have  the  managers  prosecuted  and  put  in  jail. 

Such  changes  in  the  distribution  of  power  as  have  occurred 
between  owners  and  their  managers  have  certainly  neither  de- 
stroyed the  propertied  class  nor  diminished  its  power.  All  the 
structural  changes  upon  which  the  notion  of  'a  managerial  revo- 
lution' presumably  rests  are  more  accurately  understood  (1)  as 
a  modification  of  the  distribution  of  operating  power  within  the 
propertied  class  as  a  whole;  and  (2)  as  a  general  bureaucratiza- 
tion of  property  relations. 

Changes  have  occurred  within  the  industrial  propertied  class 
in  such  a  way  that  the  actual  wielding  of  power  is  delegated  to 
hierarchies;  the  entrepreneurial  function  has  been  bureaucra- 
tized.  But  the  top  man  in  the  bureaucracy  is  a  powerful  member 
of  the  propertied  class.  He  derives  his  right  to  act  from  the  insti- 
tution of  property;  he  does  act  in  so  far  as  he  possibly  can  in  a 
manner  he  believes  is  to  the  interests  of  the  private-property 
system;  he  does  feel  in  unity,  politically  and  status-wise  as  well 
as  economically,  with  his  class  and  its  source  of  wealth. 

Observers  who  are  shocked  by  recognition  of  the  fact  that  the 
immediate  power  which  property  gives  may  be  delegated  or, 
under  certain  circumstances,  usurped  by  higher  employees  and 
cliques  of  minority  owoiers,  often  overlook  the  source  of  power 
and  the  meaning  of  property,  while  looking  at  the  huge  and  in- 
tricate form  of  bureaucratic  big  business.  The  division  between 
'ownership'  and  'control'  of  property  does  not  diminish  the  power 
of  property:  on  the  contrary,  it  may  even  increase  it.  It  does,  how- 
ever, change  the  personnel,  the  apparatus,  and  the  property  status 
of  the  more  immediate  wielders  of  that  power. 

If  the  powerful  officials  of  U.S.  corporations  do  not  act  as  old- 
fashioned  owners  within  the  plants  and  do  not  derive  their  power 
from  personal  owoiership,  their  power  is  nevertheless  contingent 
upon  their  control  of  property.  They  are  managers  of  private 
properties,  and  if  private  property  were  'abolished,'  their  power, 
if  any,  would  rest  upon  some  other  basis,  and  they  would  have 
to  look  to  other  sources  of  authority.  Many  of  these  same  men 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  103 

might  continue  as  managers  of  factories  and  mines,  but  that  is 
a  new  pohtical  question. 

To  say  that  managers  are  managers  of  private  property  means, 
first,  that  the  principles  they  attempt  to  follow  are  not  the  budg- 
etary considerations  of  those  who  manage  public  property,  but 
rather  that  they  use  their  power  in  the  interest  of  maximizing 
profits.  Secondly,  it  means  that  property  institutions  determine 
whom  the  managers  are  responsible  to;  'they  are  responsible  to 
the  eflFective  clique  of  owners,'  conclude  TNEC  economists,  and 
to  the  large  property  class  in  general.'  Managers  have  not  been 
known  to  act  intentionally  against  the  property  interests  of  the 
large  owners.  Their  actions  are  in  the  interests  of  property  as 
they  see  them.  This  is  the  case  whether  they  act  in  relation  to  the 
workman  in  the  plant,  toward  competing  firms,  toward  the  gov- 
ernment, or  toward  the  consumers  of  their  company's  product. 
Of  course  many  men  who  own  stocks  and  bonds  and  other 
promises  do  now  own  enough  productive  facilities  to  make  a 
difference  in  the  distribution  of  power.  But  this  only  means  that 
the  managers  are  agents  of  big  property  owTiers  and  not  of 
small  ones.  Managers  of  corporations  are  the  agents  of  those 
owners  who  own  the  concentrated  most;  they  derive  such  power 
as  they  have  from  the  organizations  which  are  based  upon  prop- 
erty as  a  going  system. 

'The  Managers'  are  often  thought  of  as  scientific  technolo- 
gists or  administrative  experts  having  some  autonomous  aim. 
But  they  are  not  experts  in  charge  of  technology;  they  are 
executors  of  property.  Their  chief  attention  is  to  finance  and 
profits,  which  are  the  major  interests  of  owners.  The  managers 
who  are  supposed  to  have  usurped  the  owners'  function  actu- 
ally fulfil  it  with  as  much  or  more  devotion  as  any  owner  could. 
The  personal  relations  between  big  owners  and  their  big  man- 
agers are  of  course  not  necessarily  'authoritative,'  except  in  so 
far  as  the  owners  and  their  boards  of  directors  are  interested 
in  the  profitable  balance  sheet,  and  accordingly  judge  their 
managers  as,  in  fact,  the  managers  judge  themselves.  External 
authority  is  not  necessary  when  the  agent  has  internalized  it. 

That  the  activities  of  the  manager  of  industry  and  finance  are 
in  line  with  property  interests,  rather  than  with  'independent' 
aims,  is  revealed  by  the  motives  for  the  merging  and  building 


104  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

up  of  huge  businesses.  By  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
industrial  consolidation  in  the  United  States  had  in  many  lines 
gone  far  enough  to  realize  the  major  technical  advantages  of 
large-scale  production.  The  pre- World  War  I  trust  movement 
was  not  primarily  motivated  by  a  desire  for  technical  eflBciency, 
but  by  'financial  and  strategic  advantages.'  Creating  size  in 
business  has  often  permitted  the  manipulation  of  funds  and 
power  by  business  insiders  and  financial  outsiders  for  their  own 
enrichment— and,  of  course,  the  suppression  of  competition  and 
the  gaining  of  promotional  and  underwriting  profits.  The  kind 
of  combinations  of  functions  in  industry  which  increases  pro- 
ductivity occurs  primarily  within  a  physical  plant,  rather  than 
between  various  plants. 

The  question  is  whether  or  not  the  managers  fulfil  the  entre- 
preneurial function  in  such  a  way  as  to  modify  the  way  in  which 
the  owners  would  fulfil  it.  But  how  could  they  do  so,  when  the 
institution  of  private  property,  the  power  of  property,  and  the 
function  of  the  entrepreneur  remain?  The  manager,  as  Edwin 
Nourse  observes,  is  still  rated  'on  evidence  of  the  profitableness 
of  the  company's  operations  while  under  his  management.  .  .' 
It  is  true  that  managers  do  not  personally  own  the  property  they 
manage.  But  we  may  not  jump  from  this  fact  to  the  assertion  that 
they  are  not  personally  of  the  propertied  class.  On  the  contrary, 
compared  to  the  population  at  large,  they  definitely  form  a  seg- 
ment of  the  small,  much-propertied  circle.  At  least  two-thirds  of 
the  $75,000  a  year  and  up  incomes  of  corporation  managers  are 
derived  from  property  holdings.  Top-level  managers  ( presumably 
the  most  'powerful' )  are  socially  and  politically  in  tune  with  other 
large  property  holders.  Their  image  of  ascent  involves  moving 
further  into  the  big  propertied  circles.  The  old  road  to  property 
was  starting  a  firm  and  building  it  up,  rising  in  class  position 
with  its  expansion;  that  road  is  now  closed  to  nearly  all.  The  way 
into  propertied  circles,  via  management  posts  and/or  suitable 
marriages,  is  more  likely  to  be  within  the  large  propeftied  bu- 
reaucracies. 

Intercorporate  investments  and  multiple  directorships  among 
'managers'  give  further  unity  to  the  propertied  classes  as  a 
stratum.  The  handful  of  officers  and  directors  of  the  AT&T 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  105 

who  hold  171  directorships  or  offices  in  other  enterprises  are  not 
simply  holding  'honorary  degrees';  where  the  corporations  whose 
directors  interlock  also  have  interlocking  business,  these  men  pay 
attention;  in  such  ways  a  community  of  property  interest,  a  reso- 
lution of  sharp  competitive  conflicts,  can  arise.  Consolidations 
have  given  further  'unity  to  the  ownership,  but  not  to  the  pro- 
ductive processes  of  subsidiary  plants.'  The  aim  has  been  further 
monopoly  of  national  markets  and  the  profitable  consolidation 
of  property. 

The  image  of  the  big  businessman  as  master-builder  and  profit- 
maker,  as  already  noted  of  the  old  captain  of  industry,  no  longer 
holds.  The  top  manager's  relation  to  productive  work  and  engi- 
neering is  a  financial  one.  His  relations  with  the  industrial  man- 
ager, in  terms  of  power,  are  not  unlike  those  of  the  politician 
with  the  government  official,  or  the  elected  labor  leader  with  his 
appointed  staff  expert.  The  corporation  official  has  the  final  say-so; 
for  in  the  bureaucratization  of  the  powers  of  property,  he  rep- 
resents the  big  money  and  in  his  relations  with  major  owners  is 
treated  as  a  status  equal,  belonging  to  their  clubs,  and  acting  in 
their  behalf. 

In  the  political  sphere,  no  American  manager  has  taken  a 
stand  that  is  against  the  interests  of  private  property  as  an  insti- 
tution. As  its  chief  defender,  rhetorically  and  practically,  the 
manager  has  a  political  mind  similar  to  that  of  any  large  owner, 
from  whom  he  derives  his  power;  and  in  his  present  form  he  will 
last  no  longer  than  property  as  an  institution.  Thus,  although 
the  bureaucratization  of  property  involves  a  distribution  of 
power  among  large  subordinate  staffs,  the  executives  of  the  mod- 
ern corporation  in  America  form  an  utterly  reliable  committee 
for  managing  the  affairs  and  pushing  for  the  common  interests  of 
the  entire  big-property  class. 

So  far  as  men  may  do  as  they  will  with  the  property  that  they 
own  or  that  they  manage  for  owners,  they  have  power  over  other 
men.  Changes  in  the  size  and  the  distribution  of  property  have 
brought  with  them  an  increased  power  for  some  and  a  corres- 
ponding powerlessness  for  many.  The  shift  is  from  widespread 
entrepreneurial  property  to  narrowed  class  property.  The  owner- 
ship of  property  now  means  much  more  than  power  over  the 


106  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

things  that  are  owned;  it  means  power  over  men  who  do  not  own 
these  things;  it  selects  those  who  may  command  and  those  who 
must  obey. 


6.  Three  Trends 

The  managerial  demiurge  has  come  to  contain  three  trends 
which  increasingly  give  it  meaning  and  shape.  As  it  spreads  (i), 
its  higher  functions,  as  well  as  those  lower  in  the  hierarchy,  are 
rationalized;  as  this  occurs  (ii),  the  enterprise  and  the  bureau 
become  fetishes,  and  (in),  the  forms  of  power  that  are  wielded, 
all  up  and  down  the  line,  shift  from  explicit  authority  to  manipu- 
lation. 

I.  The  rationalization  of  the  corporate  structure,  even  at  the 
top,  may  not  be  lodged  in  the  head  of  a  single  living  man,  but 
buried  in  an  accounting  system  served  by  dozens  of  managers, 
clerks,  and  specialists,  no  one  of  whom  knows  what  it  is  all  about 
or  what  it  may  mean.  The  man  who  started  the  enterprise,  if 
there  ever  was  such  a  man,  may  long  be  gone.  Franz  Kafka  has 
written  of  '.  .  .  a  peculiar  characteristic  of  our  administrative 
apparatus.  Along  with  its  precision  it's  extremely  sensitive  as 
well  .  .  .  suddenly  in  a  flash  the  decision  comes  in  some  unfore- 
seen place,  that  moreover,  can't  be  found  any  longer  later  on,  a 
decision  that  settles  the  matter,  if  in  most  cases  justly,  yet  all  the 
same,  arbitrarily.  It's  as  if  the  administrative  apparatus  were  un- 
able any  longer  to  bear  the  tension,  the  year-long  irritation 
caused  by  the  same  affair— probably  trivial  in  itself— and  had  hit 
upon  the  decision  by  itself,  without  the  assistance  of  the  officials. 
Of  course,  a  miracle  didn't  happen  and  certainly  it  was  some 
clerk  who  hit  upon  the  solution  or  the  unwritten  decision,  but  in 
any  case  it  couldn't  be  discovered  by  us  at  least,  by  us  here,  or 
even  by  the  Head  Bureau,  which  clerk  had  decided  in  this  case 
and  on  what  grounds  .  .  .  we  will  never  learn  it;  besides  by  this 
time  it  would  scarcely  interest  anybody.' 

It  seems  increasingly  that  all  managers  are  'middle'  managers, 
who  are  not  organized  in  such  a  manner  as  to  allow  them  to  as- 
sume collective  responsibility.  They  form,  as  Edmund  Wilson 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  107 

has  observed  of  'capitalistic  society  in  America,'  'a  vast  system 
for  passing  the  buck.' 

In  trade,  the  department  manager,  floorman,  and  salesperson 
replace  the  merchant;  in  industry,  the  plant  engineers  and  staffs 
of  foremen  replace  the  manufacturing  proprietor;  and  in  prac- 
tically all  brackets  of  the  economy,  middle  managers  become  the 
routinized  general  staff  without  final  responsibility  and  decision. 
Social  and  technical  divisions  of  labor  among  executives  cut  the 
nerve  of  independent  initiative.  As  decisions  are  split  and  shared 
and  as  the  whole  function  of  management  expands,  the  filing 
case  and  its  attendants  come  between  the  decision  maker  and 
his  means  of  execution. 

An  'inventory  control'  is  set  up  for  the  management  cadre  and, 
as  the  U.S.  Naval  Institute  has  it,  there  is  a  'detailed  man-by- 
man  analysis  of  all  the  people  in  a  company  who  hold  super- 
visory jobs';  classifying  each  man  as  'promotable,  satisfactory, 
unsatisfactory'  on  the  basis  of  interviews  'with  him,  his  superior, 
and  his  subordinates  and  perhaps  some  scientific  testing';  work- 
ing out  a  concrete  time-schedule  'for  each  promotable  man'  and 
another  'for  getting  rid  of  the  deadwood.'  Since  top  managers 
cannot  serve  the  market  properly  and  at  the  same  time  manage 
their  'giant  bureaucracy,'  they  rationalize  the  top,  divide  them- 
selves into  Boards,  Commissions,  Authorities,  Committees,  De- 
partments; the  organization  expert  thus  becomes  a  key  person 
in  the  managerial  cadre,  as  it  shifts  from  the  open  occupational 
market  to  managed  selection  and  control.  This  administrative 
official,  a  sort  of  manager  of  managers,  as  well  as  of  other  per- 
sonnel, is  in  turn  rationalized  and  acquires  a  staff  of  industrial 
psychologists  and  researchers  into  human  relations,  whose  do- 
main includes  personal  traits  and  mannerisms,  as  well  as  techni- 
cal skills.  These  officials  and  technicians  embody  the  true  mean- 
ing of  the  'personal  equation'  in  the  mass  life  of  modern  organi- 
zation: the  rationalization  of  all  its  higher  functions. 

II.  In  the  managerial  demiurge,  the  capitalist  spirit  itself  has 
been  bureaucratized  and  the  enterprise  fetishized.  'There  is,' 
Henry  Ford  said,  'something  sacred  about  a  big  business.'  'The 
object  of  the  businessman's  work,'  Walter  Rathenau  wrote  in 
1908,  'of  his  worries,  his  pride  and  his  aspirations  is  just  his  enter- 


108  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

prise  .  .  .  the  enterprise  seems  to  take  on  form  and  substance, 
and  to  be  ever  with  him,  having,  as  it  were,  by  virtue  of  his 
bookkeeping,  his  organization,  and  his  branches,  an  independent 
economic  existence.  The  businessman  is  wholly  devoted  to  mak- 
ing his  business  a  flourishing,  healthy,  living  organism.'  This  is 
the  inner,  fetish-like  meaning  of  his  activity. 

The  giant  enterprise,  Werner  Sombart  has  shown,  impersonally 
takes  unto  itself  those  sober  virtues  that  in  earlier  phases  of 
capitalism  were  personally  cultivated  by  the  entrepreneur.  Thrift, 
frugality,  honesty  have  ceased  to  be  necessary  to  the  managerial 
entrepreneur.  Once  these  virtues  were  in  the  sphere  wherein  per- 
sonal will-power  was  exercised;  now  they  have  become  part  of 
the  mechanism  of  business;  they  'have  been  transferred  to  the 
business  concern.'  They  were  'characteristics  of  human  beings'; 
now  they  are  'objective  principles  of  business  methods.'  When 
'the  industrious  tradesman  went  through  his  day's  work  in  con- 
scious self-mastery'  it  was  necessary  'to  implant  a  solid  foundation 
of  duties'  in  the  consciousness  of  men.  But  now  'the  businessman 
works  at  high  pressure  because  the  stress  of  economic  activities 
carries  him  along  in  spite  of  himself.'  When  the  private  and 
business  'housekeeping'  of  the  entrepreneur  were  identical,  fru- 
gality was  needed,  but  now  the  housekeeping  is  rigidly  sep- 
arated, and  the  frugal  enterprise  makes  possible  the  lavish  cor- 
porate manager,  if  he  wants  to  be  lavish.  And  so,  'the  conduct 
of  the  entrepreneur  as  a  man  may  differ  widely  from  his  conduct 
as  a  tradesman.'  The  name  of  the  firm  is  all  that  matters,  and 
this  name  does  not  rest  upon  the  personal  quality  of  the  entre- 
preneurial flair  of  its  head;  it  rests  upon  business  routine  and  the 
careful  administration  of  appropriate  publicity. 

No  matter  what  the  motives  of  individual  owners  and  manag- 
ers, clerks,  and  workers,  may  be,  the  Enterprise  itself  comes  in 
time  to  seem  autonomous,  with  a  motive  of  its  own:  to  manipu- 
late the  world  in  order  to  make  a  profit.  But  this  motive  is  em- 
bodied in  the  rationalized  enterprise,  which  is  out  for  the  secure 
and  steady  return  rather  than  the  deal  with  chance. 

Just  as  the  working  man  no  longer  owns  the  machine  but  is 
controlled  by  it,  so  the  middle-class  man  no  longer  owns  the 
enterprise  but  is  controlled  by  it.  The  vices  as  well  as  the  virtues 
of  the  old  entrepreneur  have  been  'transferred  to  the  business 


THE  AAANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  109 

concern.'  The  aggressive  business  types,  seen  by  Herman  Mel- 
ville as  greedy,  crooked  creatures  on  the  edges  of  an  expanding 
nineteenth-century  society  are  replaced  in  twentieth-century  so- 
ciety by  white-collar  managers  and  clerks  who  may  be  neither 
greedy  nor  aggressive  as  persons,  but  who  man  the  machines  that 
often  operate  in  a  'greedy  and  aggressive'  manner.  The  men  are 
cogs  in  a  business  machinery  that  has  routinized  greed  and  made 
aggression  an  impersonal  principle  of  organization. 

The  bureaucratic  enterprise  itself  sets  the  pace  of  decision  and 
obedience  for  the  business  and  governmental  ofiBcialdom  and  the 
world  of  clerks  and  bookkeepers,  even  as  the  motions  of  the 
worker  are  geared  to  the  jump  of  the  machine  and  the  command 
of  the  foreman.  Since  the  aims  of  each  of  its  activities  must  be 
related  to  master  purposes  within  it,  the  purposes  of  the  enter- 
prise in  time  become  men's  motives,  and  vice  versa.  The  manner 
of  their  action,  held  within  rules,  is  the  manner  of  the  enterprise. 
Since  their  authority  inheres  not  in  their  persons,  but  in  its 
offices,  their  authority  belongs  to  the  enterprise.  Their  status, 
and  hence  their  relations  to  others  in  the  hierarchy,  inhere  in 
the  titles  on  their  doors:  the  enterprise  with  its  Board  of  Di- 
rectors is  the  source  of  all  honor  and  authority.  Their  safety 
from  those  above  and  their  authority  over  those  below  derive 
from  its  rules  and  regulations.  In  due  course,  their  very  self- 
images,  what  they  do  and  what  they  are,  are  derived  from  the 
enterprise.  They  know  some  of  its  secrets,  although  not  all  of 
them,  and  their  career  proceeds  according  to  its  rule  and  within 
its  graded  channels.  Only  within  those  rules  are  they  supposed, 
impersonally,  to  compete  with  others. 

III.  Coercion,  the  ultimate  type  of  power,  involves  the  use  of 
physical  force  by  the  power-holder;  those  who  cannot  be  other- 
wise influenced  are  handled  physically  or  in  some  way  used 
against  their  will.  Authority  involves  the  more  or  less  voluntary 
obedience  of  the  less  powerful;  the  problem  of  authority  is  to 
find  out  who  obeys  whom,  when,  and  for  what  reasons.  Manipu- 
lation is  a  secret  or  impersonal  exercise  of  power;  the  one  who 
is  influenced  is  not  explicitly  told  what  to  do  but  is  nevertheless 
subject  to  the  will  of  another. 


no  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

In  modem  society,  coercion,  monopolized  by  the  democratic 
state,  is  rarely  needed  in  any  continuous  way.  But  those  who 
hold  power  have  often  come  to  exercise  it  in  hidden  ways:  they 
have  moved  and  they  are  moving  from  authority  to  manipula- 
tion. Not  only  the  great  bureaucratic  structures  of  modern  soci- 
ety, themselves  means  of  manipulation  as  well  as  authority,  but 
also  the  means  of  mass  communication  are  involved  in  the  shift. 
The  managerial  demiurge  extends  to  opinion  and  emotion  and 
even  to  the  mood  and  atmosphere  of  given  acts. 

Under  the  system  of  explicit  authority,  in  the  round,  solid 
nineteenth  century,  the  victim  knew  he  was  being  victimized, 
the  misery  and  discontent  of  the  powerless  were  explicit.  In  the 
amorphous  twentieth-century  world,  where  manipulation  re- 
places authority,  the  victim  does  not  recognize  his  status.  The 
formal  aim,  implemented  by  the  latest  psychological  equipment, 
is  to  have  men  internalize  what  the  managerial  cadres  would 
have  them  do,  without  their  knowing  their  own  motives,  but 
nevertheless  having  them.  Many  whips  are  inside  men,  who  do 
not  know  how  they  got  there,  or  indeed  that  they  are  there. 
In  the  movement  from  authority  to  manipulation,  power  shifts 
from  the  visible  to  the  invisible,  from  the  known  to  the  anony- 
mous. And  with  rising  material  standards,  exploitation  becomes 
less  material  and  more  psychological. 

No  longer  can  the  problem  of  power  be  set  forth  as  the  simple 
one  of  changing  the  processes  of  coercion  into  those  of  consent. 
The  engineering  of  consent  to  authority  has  moved  into  the  realm 
of  manipulation  where  the  powerful  are  anonymous.  Impersonal 
manipulation  is  more  insidious  than  coercion  precisely  because 
it  is  hidden;  one  cannot  locate  the  enemy  and  declare  war  upon 
him.  Targets  for  aggression  are  unavailable,  and  certainty  is  taken 
from  men. 

In  a  world  dominated  by  a  vast  system  of  abstractions,  man- 
agers may  become  cold  with  principle  and  do  what  local  and 
immediate  masters  of  men  could  never  do.  Their  social  insulation 
results  in  deadened  feelings  in  the  face  of  the  impoverishment 
of  life  in  the  lower  orders  and  its  stultification  in  the  upper 
circles.  We  do  not  mean  merely  that  there  are  managers  of  bu- 
reaucracies and  of  communication  agencies  who  scheme  (al- 
though, in  fact,  there  are,  and  their  explicit  ideology  is  one  of 


THE  MANAGERIAL  DEMIURGE  111 

manipulation ) ;  but  more,  we  mean  that  the  social  control  of  the 
system  is  such  that  irresponsibility  is  organized  into  it. 

Organized  irresponsibility,  in  this  impersonal  sense,  is  a  lead- 
ing characteristic  of  modern  industrial  societies  everywhere.  On 
every  hand  the  individual  is  confronted  with  seemingly  remote 
organizations;  he  feels  dwarfed  and  helpless  before  the  mana- 
gerial cadres  and  their  manipulated  and  manipulative  minions. 

That  the  power  of  property  has  been  bureaucratized  in  the 
corporation  does  not  diminish  that  power;  indeed,  bureaucracy 
increases  the  use  and  the  protection  of  property  power.  The  state 
purportedly  contains  a  balance  of  power,  but  one  must  examine 
the  recruitment  of  its  leading  personnel,  and  above  all  the  actual 
effects  of  its  policies  on  various  classes,  in  order  to  understand 
the  source  of  the  power  it  wields. 

Bureaucracies  not  only  rest  upon  classes,  they  organize  the 
power  struggle  of  classes.  Within  the  business  firm,  personnel  ad- 
ministration regulates  the  terms  of  employment,  just  as  would 
the  labor  union,  should  a  union  exist:  these  bureaucracies  fight 
over  who  works  at  what  and  for  how  much.  Their  fight  is  in- 
creasingly picked  up  by  governmental  bureaus.  More  generally, 
government  manages  whole  class  levels  by  taxation,  price,  and 
wage  control,  administrating  who  gets  what,  when,  and  how. 
Rather  than  the  traditional  inheritance  of  son  from  father,  or  the 
free  liberal  choice  of  occupation  on  an  open  market,  educational 
institutions  and  vocational  guidance  experts  would  train  and  fit 
individuals  of  various  abilities  and  class  levels  into  the  levels  of 
the  pre-existing  hierarchies.  Within  the  firm,  again,  and  as  part 
of  the  bureaucratic  management  of  mass  democracy,  the  graded 
hierarchy  fragments  class  situations,  just  as  minute  gradations 
replace  more  homogeneous  masses  at  the  base  of  the  pyramids. 
The  traditional  and  often  patriarchal  ties  of  the  old  enterprise 
are  replaced  by  rational  and  planned  linkages  in  the  new,  and 
the  rational  systems  hide  their  power  so  that  no  one  sees  their 
sources  of  authority  or  understands  their  calculations.  For  the 
bureaucracy,  Marx  wrote  in  1842,  the  world  is  an  object  to  be 
manipulated. 


6 


Old  Professions  and  New  Skills 


The  professional  strata  are  the  seat  of  such  intellectual  powers 
as  are  used  for  income  in  the  United  States,  In  and  around  these 
occupations,  which  require  specialized,  systematic,  and  often 
lengthy  training,  the  highest  skills  of  the  arts  and  sciences  are 
socially  organized  and  applied.  They  most  clearly  exemplify  the 
rationalist  ethos  that  has  been  held  to  be  the  characteristic  mark 
and  the  essential  glory  of  western  civilization  itself.  So  any 
changes  in  their  social  basis  and  composition  would,  in  one  way 
or  another,  be  reflected  in  western  society's  level  of  technique, 
art,  and  intellectual  sensibility. 

In  no  sphere  of  twentieth-century  society  has  the  shift  from 
the  old  to  the  new  middle-class  condition  been  so  apparent,  and 
its  ramification  so  wide  and  deep,  as  in  the  professions.  Most 
professionals  are  now  salaried  employees;  much  professional 
work  has  become  divided  and  standardized  and  fitted  into  the 
new  hierarchical  organizations  of  educated  skill  and  service;  in- 
tensive and  narrow  specialization  has  replaced  self-cultivation 
and  wide  knowledge;  assistants  and  sub-professionals  perform 
routine,  although  often  intricate,  tasks,  while  successful  profes- 
sional men  become  more  and  more  the  managerial  type.  So  de- 
cisive have  such  shifts  been,  in  some  areas,  that  it  is  as  if  ration- 
ality itself  had  been  expropriated  from  the  individual  and  been 
located,  as  a  new  form  of  brain  power,  in  the  ingenious  bureauc- 
racy itself. 

Yet,  the  old  professional  middle  class  strongly  persists.  While 
many  salaried  professionals  exemplify  most  sharply  the  bureau- 

112 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  113 

cratic  manner  of  existence,  many  other  professionals  who  remain 
free,  especially  in  medicine  and  law,  have  in  a  curious  way  be- 
come a  new  seat  of  private-enterprise  practice. 

These  two  coexisting  themes— of  bureaucracy  and  of  commer- 
cialization—guide our  understanding  of  the  U.S.  professional 
world  today. 


1.  The  Professions  and  Bureaucracy 

Most  of  the  old  professionals  have  long  been  free  practitioners; 
most  of  the  new  ones  have  from  their  beginnings  been  salaried 
employees.  But  the  old  professions,  such  as  medicine  and  law, 
have  also  been  invaded  by  the  managerial  demiurge  and  sur- 
rounded by  sub-professionals  and  assistants.  The  old  practition- 
er's oflBce  is  thus  supplanted  by  the  medical  clinic  and  the  law 
factory,  while  newer  professions  and  skills,  such  as  engineering 
and  advertising,  are  directly  involved  in  the  new  social  organiza- 
tions of  salaried  brain  power. 

Free  professionals  of  the  old  middle  class  have  not  been  so 
much  replaced  in  the  new  society  as  surrounded  and  supple- 
mented by  the  new  groups.  In  fact,  over  the  last  two  generations, 
free  practitioners  have  remained  a  relatively  constant  propor- 
tion (about  1  per  cent)  of  the  labor  force  as  a  whole,  and  about 
2  per  cent  of  the  middle  class  as  a  whole.  In  the  meantime, 
however,  salaried  professionals  have  expanded  from  1  to  6  per 
cent  of  all  the  people  at  work,  and  from  about  4  to  14  per  cent 
of  the  middle  class.  The  expansion  of  the  professional  strata  has 
definitely  been  an  expansion  of  its  new  middle-class  wing.  Even 
in  the  old  middle-class  world  of  1870,  salaried  professionals 
( mainly  nurses  and  schoolteachers )  made  up  a  dominant  section 
of  the  professional  strata;  only  35  per  cent  were  free  profes- 
sionals. By  1940,  however,  only  16  per  cent  were. 

The  proliferation  of  new  professional  skills  has  been  a  result 
of  the  technological  revolution  and  the  involvement  of  science 
in  wider  areas  of  economic  life;  it  has  been  a  result  of  the  demand 
for  specialists  to  handle  the  complicated  institutional  machinery 
developed  to  cope  with  the  complication  of  the  technical  envi- 
ronment. The  new  professional  skills  that  have  grown  up  thus 
center  on  the  one  hand  around  the  machineries  of  business  ad- 


114  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

ministration  and  the  mass  media  of  communication,  manipula- 
tion, and  entertainment;  and  on  the  other  hand,  around  the  in- 
dustrial process,  the  engineering  firm,  and  the  scientific  labora- 
tory. On  both  the  technical  and  the  human  side,  the  rise  of  TV, 
the  motion  picture,  radio,  mass-circulation  magazine,  and  of 
research  organizations  that  marshal  facts  about  every  nook  and 
cranny  of  the  social  and  technical  organism  has  caused  the  rise 
of  many  new  professions  and  many  more  sub-professions. 

The  old  professional  middle  class  never  needed  to  possess  prop- 
erty, but  whether  its  members  owned  their  means  of  livelihood 
or  not,  their  working  unit  has  been  small  and  personally  man- 
ageable, and  their  working  lives  have  involved  a  high  degree  of 
independence  in  day-to-day  decisions.  They  themselves  set  their 
fees  or  other  remuneration,  regulate  their  own  hours  and  condi- 
tions of  work  according  to  market  conditions  and  personal  incli- 
nations. 

As  the  old  professions  and  the  new  skills  have  become  in- 
volved in  new  middle-class  conditions,  professional  men  and 
women  have  become  dependent  upon  the  new  technical  machin- 
ery and  up"on  the  great  institutions  within  whose  routines  the 
machines  are  located.  They  work  in  some  department,  under 
some  kind  of  manager;  while  their  salaries  are  often  high,  they 
are  salaries,  and  the  conditions  of  their  work  are  laid  down  by 
rule.  What  they  work  on  is  determined  by  others,  even  as  they 
determine  how  a  host  of  sub-professional  assistants  will  work. 
Thus  they  themselves  become  part  of  the  managerial  demiurge. 

As  professional  people  of  both  old  and  new  middle  classes  be- 
come attached  to  institutions,  they  acquire  staffs  of  assistants, 
who,  in  contrast  to  the  old  professional  apprentices,  are  not 
necessarily  or  even  usually  in  training  to  become  autonomous 
professionals  themselves.  Thus  physicians  hand  over  some  of  their 
work  to  trained  nurses,  laboratory  technicians,  physical  thera- 
pists. Ministers  lose,  sometimes  willingly  and  sometimes  not,  sev- 
eral of  their  old  functions  to  social  workers  and  psychiatric  wel- 
fare workers  and  teachers.  Law  partners  give  their  less  challeng- 
ing tasks  to  clerks  and  salaried  associates.  Individual  scholars 
in  the  universities  become  directors  of  research,  with  staffs  doing 
specialized  functions,  while  the  remaining  individual  scholar 
takes  over  some  of  the  awe  and  receptiveness  toward  the  expert 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  115 

who  manages  his  specialized  and  narrow  domain.  Alongside  the 
graduate  student  apprentice  there  is  now  the  research  techni- 
cian, who  may  have  no  thought  of  becoming  an  individual 
scholar;  take  her  away  from  the  machine  and  the  organization 
and  she  ceases  to  work.  Between  the  individual  composer  of 
music  and  his  audience  there  is  the  big  symphony  orchestra,  the 
radio-chain,  the  proprietors  of  the  art  world  who  manage  the  in- 
creasingly expensive  means  of  execution  and  display.  In  prac- 
tically every  profession,  the  managerial  demiurge  works  to  build 
ingenious  bureaucracies  of  intellectual  skills. 

Bureaucratic  institutions  invade  all  professions  and  many  pro- 
fessionals now  operate  as  part  of  the  managerial  demiurge.  But 
this  does  not  mean  that  professionals  are  no  longer  entrepre- 
neurs. In  fact,  many  among  the  new  skill  groups  resemble  new 
entrepreneurs  more  than  bureaucratic  managers,  and  many  who 
work  in  the  old  free  professions  are  still  free  practitioners.  The 
bureaucratic  manner  has  not  replaced  the  entrepreneurial;  rather 
the  professional  strata  today  represent  various  combinations  of 
the  two:  at  the  bottom  extreme,  the  staflFs  of  lesser-skilled,  newer 
members  of  the  strata  begin  and  remain  bureaucratized;  at  the 
top,  the  free  and  the  salaried  professionals  make  their  own  curi- 
ous adaptation  to  the  new  conditions  prevailing  in  their  work, 

2.  The  Medical  World 

The  white-collar  world  of  medicine  is  still  presided  over  by 
the  physician  as  entrepreneur,  and,  as  L.  W,  Jones  has  observed, 
'his  ideology  remains  dominant,'  Yet  the  self-sufficiency  of  the 
entrepreneurial  physician  has  been  undermined  in  all  but  its  eco- 
nomic and  ideological  aspects  by  his  dependence,  on  the  one 
hand,  upon  technical  equipment  that  is  formally  centralized, 
and,  on  the  other,  upon  informal  organizations  that  secure  and 
maintain  his  practice. 

Medical  technology  has  of  necessity  been  centralized  in  hos- 
pital and  clinic;  the  private  practitioner  must  depend  upon  ex- 
pensive equipment  as  well  as  upon  specialists  and  technicians 
for  diagnosis  and  treatment.  He  must  also  depend  upon  relations 
with  other  doctors,  variously  located  in  the  medical  hierarchy,  to 
get  started  in  practice  and  to  keep  up  his  clientele.  For  as  medi- 


116  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

cine  has  become  technically  specialized,  some  way  of  getting 
those  who  are  ill  in  contact  with  those  who  can  help  them  is 
needed.  In  the  absence  of  a  formal  means  of  referral,  informal 
cliques  of  doctors,  in  and  out  of  hospitals,  have  come  to  perform 
this  function. 

Tendencies  toward  bureaucratization  in  the  world  of  medicine 
have  expressed  themselves  in  expansive  and  devious  ways,  but 
there  is  already  something  to  be  said  for  the  idea  that  today  the 
old  general  practitioner  is  either  an  old-fashioned  family  doctor 
in  a  small  city,  or  a  young  doctor  who  has  not  yet  got  the  money, 
skill,  or  connections  for  specializing  successfully.  The  glorifica- 
tion of  the  old  country  doctor  in  the  mass  media  suggests  a  nos- 
talgic mood.  This  type,  as  well  as  all  types  of  individual  general 
practitioner,  has  been  left  behind  by  the  progress  of  scientific 
medicine,  in  which  the  specialist  also  remains  an  entrepreneur 
in  an  institutional  context  he  hasn't  learned  to  accept  and  which 
he  exploits  economically. 

The  centralization  in  medicine  does  not  concern  individual 
partnerships  or  'group  practice'  among  physicians,  but  rather 
hospitals,  to  which  there  is  a  definite  shift  as  the  center  of  medi- 
cal practice.  Physicians  and  surgeons,  who  now  comprise  only 
one-fifth  of  medical  and  health  workers,  have  come  to  represent 
a  new  sort  of  entrepreneur.  For  they  are  attached,  as  privileged 
entrepreneurs,  to  the  otherwise  bureaucratic  hospital.  Below  the 
physician  the  shift  to  salaried  positions  of  lesser  skill  is  very 
marked;  the  sub-professions  in  medicine  are  attached  to  the  in- 
stitution. 

The  hospital,  as  Bemhard  Stern  and  others  have  made  clear,  is 
now  'the  strategic  factor'  in  medical  care  and  education;  scientific 
and  technological  developments  are  making  it  more  so.  Here  the 
specialists  have  access  to  the  funded  equipment  for  diagnosis 
and  experiment  and  to  contacts  with  other  specialists,  so  impor- 
tant for  scientific  advancement  and  learning.  Economically,  the 
coming  of  the  hospital  into  a  focal  position  has  'increased  the 
medical  bill  of  the  population  and  put  adequate  medical  care, 
as  now  organized,  beyond  the  reach  of  the  low  income  groups.' 

The  old  general  practitioner,  whom  scientific  advances  and 
team-work  in  hospital  and  clinic  have  made  technologically  obso- 
lete, fights  the  hospital  as  any  old  middle-class  entrepreneur 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  117 

fights  large-scale  technical  superiority.  The  new  specialist,  if  he 
is  'in,'  exploits  his  position  economically,  or,  if  he  is  'out,'  often 
has  a  trained  incapacity  to  practice  general  medicine. 

In  the  medical  world  as  a  whole  an  increased  proportion  of 
physicians  are  specialists  who  enjoy  greater  prestige  and  income 
than  the  general  practitioner  and  are  necessarily  relied  upon  by 
him.  These  specialists  are  concentrated  in  the  cities  and  tend  to 
work  among  the  wealthy  classes,  making  about  twice  as  much 
money  as  general  practitioners.  They  form,  in  most  cities,  what 
Oswald  Hall  has  aptly  called  'the  inner  fraternity'  of  the  medical 
profession  and,  as  Professor  Hall  has  indicated,  they  control 
appointments  to  medical  institutions,  discipline  intruders,  dis- 
tribute patients  among  themselves  and  other  doctors— in  short, 
seek  to  control  competition  and  the  medical  career  at  each  of 
its  stages.  They  form  a  tightly  organized  in-group,  with  a  tech- 
nical division  of  labor  and  a  firmly  instituted  way  of  organizing 
the  sick  market.  As  young  doctors  see  the  way  the  pyramid 
is  shaped,  they  tend  to  bypass  the  experience  of  the  old  general 
practitioner  altogether. 

But  specialized  or  not,  the  proportion  of  physicians  has  nar- 
rowed, while  that  of  all  other  medical  personnel  has  expanded; 
and  all  medical  personnel  other  than  doctors  tend  to  become 
salaried  employees  of  one  sort  or  another,  whereas  most  physi- 
cians are  still  independent  practitioners.  The  proportionately 
narrowed  stratum  of  physicians  has,  in  fact,  been  made  possible 
precisely  by  the  enormous  increase  of  specialized  and  general 
assistants.  In  1900  there  were  11  physicians  to  every  1  graduate 
nurse;  in  1940  there  were  2  graduate  nurses  for  every  physi- 
cian. Above  the  general  practitioner  is  the  specialist,  informally 
organized  with  reference  to  the  inner  fraternity;  below  him  are 
the  increasing  number  of  assistants  and  sub-professionals,  at  the 
first  call  of  the  inner  fraternity  and  usually  attached  to  the 
hospital. 

The  nurse  is  most  curiously  involved  in  this  complicated  insti- 
tution. Most  'training  schools'  are  owned  and  operated  by  hos- 
pitals; 'in  return  for  classroom  education,  apprenticeship  training 
in  hospital,  room,  board,  laundry,  and  free  medical  attention,  the 
student  nurse  is  expected  to  give  her  services  willingly  to  the 
hospital;  in  many  of  these  hospital  schools,  it  has  been  asserted. 


118  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

most  recently  by  Eli  Ginzberg,  director  of  the  New  York  State 
Hospital  Study,  the  primary  purpose  is  not  so  much  'education' 
as  simply  a  means  of  getting  cheap  labor,  for  they  find  it  less 
expensive  to  train  students  than  to  hire  graduate  nurses. 

The  persistence  of  its  independent  practitioners  is  one  of  the 
most  decisive  facts  about  the  medical  world  today.  Of  all  pro- 
fessions, those  of  physicians,  surgeons,  osteopaths,  and  dentists 
contain  the  highest  proportion  of  independent  practitioners:  from 
80  to  90  per  cent.  They  are  still  a  scatter  of  individual  practices, 
but  they  are  clustered  around  the  large-scale  institutional  devel- 
opments. Only  46  per  cent  of  the  pharmacists  and  only  8  per 
cent  of  the  nurses— the  largest  single  group  in  medicine— are  free 
practitioners,  and  the  many  fledgling  sub-professionals  and  tech- 
nicians of  medicine  are  without  notable  exception  in  salaried 
positions.  The  sub-professions  and  assistants  are  concentrated 
in  institutional  centers,  which  the  physicians  use— as  individual 
practitioners. 

A  hospital  is  a  bureaucracy  with  many  traditional  hangovers 
from  its  less  bureaucratic  past;  it  is  a  bureaucracy  that  trains 
many  of  its  own  staff  and,  while  it  may  set  some  free  again,  they 
still  depend  upon  it.  As  hospitals  replace  the  doctor's  oflBce  as 
the  center  of  the  medical  world,  the  young  doctor  himself  is  no 
longer  apprenticed  to  another  physician,  as  was  the  case  up  to 
the  1840's,  but  becomes  an  intern,  an  apprentice  to  the  institu- 
tion of  the  hospital.  Later,  as  a  private  practitioner,  if  he  is  for- 
tunate, he  uses  its  facilities  for  his  patients.  Moreover,  through- 
out his  career,  his  appointments  to  hospital  posts  are  crucial  to 
his  medical  practice.  'The  more  important  hospital  posts,'  Oswald 
Hall  has  concluded,  'are  associated  with  the  highly  specialized 
practices  and  usually  with  the  most  lucrative  types.  The  two 
form  an  interrelated  system.'  This  system  narrows  the  general 
practitioner's  market  and  implies  (correctly)  that  he  is  incom- 
petent to  handle  many  types  of  illness. 

The  large-scale  medical  institution,  with  its  specialization  and 
salaried  staff,  is  controlled  by  an  inner  corps  of  physicians  co- 
operating with  one  another  as  entrepreneurs.  In  this  situation,  a 
selection  of  those  with  managerial  abilities,  who  are  in  with  the 
clique,  undoubtedly  goes  on.  Who  becomes  the  hospital  head, 
the  clinic  chieftain,  the  head  of  a  medical  office  of  a  great  in- 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  119 

dustry?  The  medical  bureaucrat  and  the  scientific  laboratory- 
oriented  specialist,  and  above  all,  the  man  with  entrepreneurial 
talent  working  through  medical  bureaucracies,  now  surround  the 
old  general  practitioner  who  once  was  all  these  things  on  a  small 
scale.  But  what  seems  important  about  the  specialization  of  medi- 
cine is  that  it  has  not  occurred  in  a  strictly  bureaucratic  way; 
these  trends,  as  well  as  others,  have  all  been  limited  and  even 
shaped  by  commercial  motives. 

The  relative  lack  of  expansion  of  the  medical  profession,  de- 
spite two  world  wars  with  their  enormous  medical  demands  and 
a  general  increase  in  medical  needs,  is  one  of  the  most  remark- 
able facts  of  U.S.  occupational  structure.  In  1900  there  was  1 
licensed  physician  for  every  578  persons  in  the  United  States; 
in  1940  there  was  1  for  every  750  persons.  Moreover,  not  all 
licensed  physicians  were  practicing;  in  1940  there  was  1  active 
physician  to  every  935  persons.  This  closing  up  of  the  medical 
ranks  has  been  made  possible  by  (1)  the  expansion  of  medical 
assistants  and  sub-professions  in  medical  organizations,  to  which 
the  entrepreneurial  physician  has  had  access;  (2)  the  increased 
diflBculty  of  ascent  possible  through  expensive  educational  proc- 
esses; (3)  the  deliberate  policies  of  the  American  Medical  As- 
sociation and  the  heads  of  some  of  the  leading  medical  schools. 

The  AMA,  the  trade  association  of  the  physician  as  a  small 
businessman,  represents  him— to  federal  and  state  governments, 
medical  schools  and  hospital  boards,  as  well  as  to  the  lay  public. 
It  has  great  weight  within  the  leading  medical  schools.  Physi- 
cians may  differ  about  the  public  problems  of  medicine  and 
health,  many  individuals  among  them  may  even  be  confused, 
but  the  point  of  view  of  the  AMA  is  that  of  the  NAM  applied 
to  medicine  in  a  complicated  and  needful  world.  It  cries  aloud 
against  the  'evils  of  regimentation'  and  national  health  bills. 
While  the  fact,  agreed  to  by  the  majority  of  scholars  in  the  field, 
is  that  'where  the  need  is  greatest,  there  satisfaction  is  least,'  the 
principle  expounded  by  the  AMA  is  liberty  for  all  physicians, 
which,  profession  or  no  profession,  means  exactly  what  it  means 
for  all  old  middle-class  elements.  The  profession  as  a  whole  is 
politically  uninterested  or  ignorant;  its  members  are  easy  victims 
and  ready  exponents  ot  the  U.S.  businessman's  psychology  of 


120  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

individualism,  in  which  Hberty  means  no  state  interference,  ex- 
cept a  rigid  state  licensing  system. 

The  professional  ethics  in  which  this  interest  group  clothes  its 
business  drive  is  an  obsolete  mythology,  but  it  has  been  of  great 
use  to  those  who  would  adapt  themselves  to  predatory  ways,  at- 
tempting to  close  the  ranks  and  to  freeze  the  inequality  of  status 
among  physicians  and  the  inequality  of  medical  care  among  the 
population  at  large.  Even  in  the  middle  of  the  Second  World 
War,  the  dean  of  a  leading  medical  school  held  'the  supply  of 
doctors  adequate'  and  bewailed  the  'alarm  over  the  alleged 
shortage  .  .  .'  of  doctors. 

Other  occupations  in  medicine  have  followed  the  AMA  lead. 
The  entrepreneurial  policy  of  business  unionism  in  medicine  has 
been  implemented  by  the  fact  that  medical  education  has  be- 
come increasingly  expensive  at  a  time  when  upward  mobility 
has  been  generally  tightening  up.  It  has  been  correctly  charged 
that  there  are  quotas  for  minorities  in  medical  schools;  in  addi- 
tion to  skin  color,  religion,  and  national  origin,  the  quota  system 
rests  on  the  class  and  professional  status  of  the  would-be  doctor's 
parents. 

Once  through  the  medical  school,  the  young  doctors  face  the 
hospital,  which  they  find  also  contains  departments,  hierarchies, 
and  grades.  One  hospital  administrator  in  an  eastern  city  told 
Oswald  Hall  how  interns  are  selected:  'The  main  qualification  as 
far  as  I  can  see  is  "personality."  Now  that  is  an  intangible  sort 
of  thing.  It  means  partly  the  ability  to  mix  well,  to  be  humble 
to  older  doctors  in  the  correct  degree,  and  to  be  able  to  assume 
the  proper  degree  of  superiority  toward  the  patient.  Since  all 
medical  schools  now  are  Grade  A  there  is  no  point  in  holding 
competitive  examinations.  .  .  Another  reason  for  not  holding 
competitive  examinations  for  internships  is  that  there  are  a  lot  of 
Jews  in  medicine.  Did  you  know  that?'  Another  hospital  ad- 
ministrator said:  'There  are  good  specialists  among  the  older 
doctors  who  cannot  pass  examinations  but  they  deserve  to  be 
protected  in  their  positions  in  the  hospitals.'  After  discussing 
various  changes  that  have  lengthened  the  period  of  training  and 
prohibited  the  poor  from  working  their  way  into  medicine,  this 
physician  spoke  of  the  ethics  of  his  profession:  'It  means  that 
the  specialists  are  selected  from  the  old  established  families  in 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  121 

the  community,  and  family  and  community  bonds  are  pretty  im- 
portant in  making  a  person  abide  by  a  code.' 

The  inner  core  that  abides  by  this  code  not  only  controls  the 
key  posts  in  the  hospital,  but  virtually  the  practice  of  medicine 
in  a  city,  much  more  effectively  it  often  seems  than  boilermakers 
or  auto-workers  control  the  work  and  pay  in  their  fields.  It  is  with 
reference  to  these  highly  co-operative  enterprisers  that  the  indi- 
vidual practitioner  must  find  his  medical  role  and  practice  it. 
He  cannot  now  successfully  do  so  as  a  free-lance  man  in  an  old 
middle-class  world,  in  which  the  talented,  openly  competitive, 
come  to  the  top. 

3.  Lawyers 

Both  Tocqueville,  near  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, and  Bryce,  near  the  end,  thought  the  American  lawyers' 
prestige  was  very  high;  in  fact,  they  believed  lawyers,  as  Willard 
Hurst  puts  it,  to  be  a  sort  of  ersatz  aristocracy.  Yet  there  has 
always  been  an  ambiguity  about  the  popular  image  of  lawyers— 
they  are  honorable  but  they  are  also  sharp.  A  code  of  profes- 
sional ethics,  it  should  be  recalled,  was  not  adopted  by  the 
American  Bar  Association  until  1908,  and  even  then  did  not  really 
deal  with  the  Bar's  social  responsibility. 

Before  the  ascendancy  of  the  large  corporation,  skill  and  elo- 
quence in  advocacy  selected  nineteenth-century  leaders  of  the 
bar;  reputations  and  wealth  were  created  and  maintained  in  the 
courts,  of  which  the  lawyer  was  an  officer.  He  was  an  agent  of 
the  law,  handling  the  general  interests  of  society,  as  fixed 
and  allowed  in  the  law;  his  day's  tasks  were  as  varied  as  human 
activity  and  experience  itself.  An  opinion  leader,  a  man  whose 
recommendations  to  the  community  counted,  who  handled  obli- 
gations and  rights  of  intimate  family  and  life  problems,  the  lib- 
erty and  property  of  all  who  had  them,  the  lawyer  personally 
pointed  out  the  course  of  the  law  and  counseled  his  client  against 
the  pitfalls  of  illegality.  Deferred  to  by  his  client,  he  carefully 
displayed  the  dignity  he  claimed  to  embody.  Rewarded  for  ap- 
parent honesty,  carrying  an  ethical  halo,  held  to  be  fit  material 
for  high  statesmanship,  the  lawyer  upheld  public  service  and  was 
professionally  above  business  motives. 


122  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

But  the  skills  and  character  of  a  profession  shift,  externally, 
as  the  function  of  the  profession  changes  with  the  nature  of  its 
clients'  interests,  and  internally,  as  the  rewards  of  the  profession 
are  given  to  new  kinds  of  success.  The  function  of  the  law  has 
been  to  shape  the  legal  framework  for  the  new  economy  of  the 
big  corporation,  with  the  split  of  ownership  and  control  and  the 
increased  monopoly  of  economic  power.  The  framework  for  this 
new  business  system  has  been  shaped  out  of  a  legal  system  rooted 
in  the  landed  property  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  and  has  been 
adapted  to  commercial,  industrial,  and  then  investment  econo- 
mies. In  the  shift,  the  public  has  become  for  the  lawyer  what 
the  public  has  been  for  the  lawyer's  chief  client— an  object  of 
profit  rather  than  of  obligation. 

There  is  one  lawyer  for  approximately  every  750  persons  in  the 
United  States  but  this  lawyer  does  not  serve  equally  each  of  these 
750.  In  rural  districts  and  small  cities,  there  is  one  lawyer  for  ap- 
proximately every  1200,  in  big  cities  one  for  every  400  or  500. 
More  directly,  people  with  little  or  no  money  are  largely  un- 
able to  hire  lawyers.  Not  persons,  not  unorganized  publics  of 
small  investors,  propertyless  workers,  consumers,  but  a  thin  upper 
crust  and  financial  interests  are  what  lawyers  serve.  Their  in- 
come, a  better  income  today  than  that  received  by  any  other 
professional  group  except  doctors,  comes  from  a  very  small 
upper  income  level  of  the  population  and  from  institutions. 

In  fulfilling  his  function  the  successful  lawyer  has  created  his 
office  in  the  image  of  the  corporations  he  has  come  to  serve  and 
defend.  Because  of  the  increased  load  of  the  law  business  and 
the  concentration  of  successful  practice,  the  law  ofiice  has  grown 
in  size  beyond  anything  dreamed  of  by  the  nineteenth-century 
solicitor.  Such  centralization  of  legal  talent,  in  order  that  it  may 
bear  more  closely  upon  the  central  functions  of  the  law,  means 
that  many  individual  practitioners  are  kept  on  the  fringes,  while 
others  become  salaried  agents  of  those  who  are  at  the  top.  As 
the  new  business  system  becomes  specialized,  with  distinct  sec- 
tions and  particular  legal  problems  of  its  own,  so  do  lawyers  be- 
come experts  in  distinct  sections  and  particular  problems,  push- 
ing the  interests  of  these  sections  rather  than  standing  outside 
the  business  system  and  serving  a  law  which  co-ordinates  the 
parts  of  a  society. 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  123 

In  the  shadow  of  the  large  corporation,  the  leading  lawyer  is 
selected  for  skill  in  the  sure  fix  and  the  easy  out-of-court  settle- 
ment. He  has  become  a  groomed  personality  whose  professional 
success  is  linked  to  a  law  office,  the  success  of  which  in  turn  is 
linked  to  the  troubles  of  the  big  corporation  and  contact  with 
those  outside  the  oflBce.  He  is  a  high  legal  strategist  for  high 
finance  and  its  profitable  reorganizations,  handling  the  aflFairs  of 
a  cluster  of  banks  and  the  companies  in  their  sphere  in  the  cheap- 
est way  possible,  making  the  most  of  his  outside  opportunities 
as  an  aide  to  big  management  that  whistles  him  up  by  telephone; 
impersonally  teaching  the  financiers  how  to  do  what  they  want 
within  the  law,  advising  on  the  chances  they  are  taking  and  how 
best  to  cover  themselves.  The  complications  of  modern  corporate 
business  and  its  dominance  in  modern  society,  A.  A.  Berle  Jr.  has 
brilliantly  shown,  have  made  the  lawyer  'an  intellectual  jobber 
and  contractor  in  business  matters,'  of  all  sorts.  More  than  a  con- 
sultant and  counselor  to  large  business,  the  lawyer  is  its  servant, 
its  champion,  its  ready  apologist,  and  is  full  of  its  sensitivity. 
Around  the  modem  corporation,  the  lawyer  has  erected  the 
legal  framework  for  the  managerial  demiurge. 

As  big  capitalist  enterprise  came  into  social  and  economic 
dominance  the  chance  to  climb  to  the  top  ranks  without  initial 
large  capital  declined.  But  the  law  'remained  one  of  the  careers 
through  which  a  man  could  attain  influence  and  wealth  even 
without  having  capital  at  the  start.'  With  law  as  background, 
the  lawyer  has  often  become  a  businessman  himself,  a  propri- 
etor of  high  acumen,  good  training,  many  contacts,  and  sound 
judgment.  In  his  own  right,  he  has  also  become  the  proprietor 
and  general  manager  of  a  factory  of  law,  with  forty  lawyers 
trained  by  Harvard,  Yale,  Columbia,  and  two  hundred  clerks, 
secretaries,  and  investigators  to  assist  him.  He  competes  with 
other  law  factories  in  pecuniary  skills  and  impersonal  loyalties, 
in  turning  out  the  standardized  document  and  the  subtle  fix  on  a 
mass  production  basis.  Such  offices  must  carry  a  huge  overhead; 
they  must,  therefore,  obtain  a  steady  flow  of  business;  they  there- 
fore become  adjuncts  'to  the  great  commercial  and  investment 
banks.'  They  appear  less  in  court  than  as  'financial  experts  and 
draftsmen  of  financial  papers.' 


124  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

The  big  money  in  law  goes  to  some  three  or  four  hundred 
metropohtan  law  factories  specializing  in  corporation  law  and 
constituting  the  brains  of  the  corporate  system.  These  law  fac- 
tories, as  Ferdinand  Lundberg  has  called  them,  are  bureauc- 
racies of  middle  size.  Perhaps  the  largest  has  about  seventy-five 
lawyers,  with  an  appropriate  staff  of  office  workers. 

The  top  men  are  chosen  as  are  film  stars,  for  their  glamour. 
Behind  them,  the  front  men,  stand  men  with  technical  abili- 
ties, as  in  Hollywood,  looking  out  for  the  main  chance  and  some- 
times finding  it,  but  working  for  a  small  salary.  Below  the  part- 
ners are  associates  who  are  salaried  lawyers,  each  usually  work- 
ing in  a  specialized  department:  general  practice,  litigation, 
trusts,  probate,  real  estate,  taxation.  Below  them  are  the  clerk- 
apprentices  in  the  law,  then  the  investigators,  bookkeepers, 
stenographers,  and  clerks.  In  special  instances  there  are  certified 
accountants  and  investment  consultants,  tax  experts,  engineers, 
lobbyists,  also  ranged  in  rank.  For  every  partner  there  may  be 
two  salaried  lawyer  assistants,  for  every  lawyer  two  or  three 
office  workers.  A  partnership  of  20  lawyers  may  thus  have  some 
40  associates  and  120  office  workers.  Such  offices,  geared  to  quan- 
tity and  speed  of  advice,  must  be  highly  organized  and  imper- 
sonally administered.  High  overhead— including  oriental  rugs  and 
antique  desks,  panelled  walls  and  huge  leather  libraries— often 
accounts  for  30  per  cent  of  the  fees  charged;  the  office  must  earn 
steadily,  and  the  work  be  systematically  ordered  in  the  way  of  the 
managerial  demiurge  everywhere.  Under  the  supervision  of  one 
of  the  partners,  the  office  manager,  sometimes  a  lawyer  who 
seldom  practices  law,  must  see  that  production  lines  and  organi- 
zation run  smoothly.  Efficiency  experts  are  called  in  to  check  up 
on  the  most  effective  operations  for  given  tasks.  In  some  offices 
each  salaried  lawyer,  like  a  mechanic  in  a  big  auto  repair  shop, 
is  required  to  account  for  his  time,  in  order  that  fees  may  be 
assigned  to  given  cases  and  the  practice  kept  moving. 

Each  department,  in  turn,  has  its  subdivisions:  specialization 
is  often  intense.  Teams  of  three  lawyers  or  so,  usually  including 
one  partner,  work  for  only  one  important  client  or  on  one  type 
of  problem.  Some  lawyers  spend  all  their  time  writing  briefs, 
others  answer  only  constitutional  questions;  some  deal  in  Federal 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  125 

Trade  Commission  actions,  others  only  with  the  ruhngs  of  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission. 

Much  of  the  work  is  impersonal,  vitiating  the  professional  pre- 
cept that  lawyer  and  client  should  maintain  a  personal  relation- 
ship. Personal  intercourse  between  the  members  of  the  profes- 
sion and  between  lawyers  and  clients,  calls  upon  each  other  on 
matters  of  business,  have  been  replaced  by  hurried  telephone 
conversations,  limited  to  the  business  at  hand,  entirely  eliminat- 
ing the  personal  quality.  An  opponent  may  be  absolutely  un- 
known, except  over  the  telephone:  you  know  the  sound  of  his 
voice,  but  if  you  were  to  meet  him  on  the  street,  you  would  be 
unable  to  recognize  him.  In  the  earlier  days,  a  comparatively  in- 
timate acquaintance  might  have  been  formed  even  with  an  op- 
ponent. Once  a  meeting  in  a  lawyer's  office  with  a  client  not  only 
was  agreeable,  but  had  a  tendency  to  begin  and  cement  a  per- 
sonal relationship.  It  now  frequently  happens  that,  although  a 
lawyer  may  be  actively  employed  for  a  client,  personal  inter- 
course does  not  occur. 

Under  this  specialization,  the  young  salaried  lawyer  does  not 
by  his  experience  round  out  into  a  man  adept  at  all  branches  of 
law;  indeed,  his  experience  may  specifically  unfit  him  for  general 
practice.  The  big  office,  it  is  said  within  the  bar,  often  draws  its 
ideas  from  the  young  men  fresh  from  the  preferred  law  schools, 
whom  the  big  offices  'rush,'  like  fraternity  men  seeking  pledges. 
Certainly  the  mass  of  the  work  is  done  by  these  able  young  men, 
while  their  product  goes  out  under  the  names  of  the  senior 
partners. 

The  young  lawyer,  just  out  of  law  school,  fresh  from  matching 
wits  with  law  professors  and  bar  examiners,  lacks  one  thing  im- 
portant for  successful  practice— contacts.  Not  only  knowledge  of 
trade  secrets,  but  the  number  of  contacts,  is  the  fruit  of  what  is 
called  experience  in  modern  business  professions.  The  young  men 
may  labor  and  provide  many  of  the  ideas  for  the  produce  that 
goes  out  under  the  older  man's  name,  but  the  older  man  is  the 
business-getter:  through  his  contacts,  Karl  Llewellyn  has  ob- 
served, he  can  attract  more  orders  than  he  or  twenty  like  him 
can  supply.  The  measure  of  such  a  man  is  the  volume  of  busi- 
ness he  can  produce;  he  creates  the  job  for  the  young  salaried 
lawyers,  then  puts  his  label  on  the  product.  He  accumulates  his 


126  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

reputation  outside  the  office  from  the  success  of  the  young  men, 
themselves  striving  for  admittance  to  partnership,  which  comes 
after  each  has  picked  up  enough  contacts  that  are  too  large  and 
dangerous  to  allow  him  to  be  kept  within  the  salaried  brackets. 
In  the  meantime  he  sweats,  and  in  the  meantime,  the  new  law- 
school  graduates  are  available  every  year,  making  a  market  with 
depressed  salaries,  further  shut  out  by  those  new  young  men  who 
have  already  inherited  through  their  families  a  name  that  is  of 
front-oflBce  caliber.  The  powerful  connection,  the  strategic  mar- 
riage, the  gilt-edged  social  life,  these  are  the  obvious  means  of 
success. 

Not  only  does  the  law  factory  serve  the  corporate  system,  but 
the  lawyers  of  the  factory  infiltrate  that  system.  At  the  top  they 
sit  on  the  Boards  of  Directors  of  banks  and  railroads,  manufac- 
turing concerns,  and  leading  educational  institutions.  The  firm 
of  Sullivan  and  Cromwell,  one  of  the  largest  law  factories,  holds 
65  directorships.  Below  the  directors,  staff  lawyers  may  be  vice 
presidents  of  the  corporation,  other  lawyers  may  be  on  annual 
retainers,  giving  the  corporation  a  proprietary  right  to  the  lawyer 
as  a  moral  agent.  Of  the  corporation,  for  the  corporation,  by  the 
corporation.  Listening  in  on  every  major  directors'  meeting, 
phrasing  public  statements  on  all  problems,  the  omnipresent  legal 
mind,  an  oflBcer  of  the  court,  assists  the  corporation,  protects  it, 
cares  for  its  interests. 

As  annex  to  the  big  finance,  the  law  factory  is  in  politics  on  a 
national  scale,  but  its  interest  in  politics  is  usually  only  a  means 
of  realizing  its  clients'  economic  interests.  Yet  the  law>'er  who  is 
successful  in  politics  in  his  own  right  is  all  the  more  important 
and  useful  to  his  former  clients,  to  whose  fold  he  often  returns 
after  a  political  interlude.  In  corporation  law  firms  one  finds  for- 
mer senators  and  representatives,  cabinet  officers,  federal  prose- 
cutors, state  and  federal  tax  officials,  ambassadors  and  ministers, 
and  others  who  have  been  acquainted  with  the  inside  workings 
of  the  upper  levels  of  the  government.  High  government  ofii- 
cials,  cabinet  oflBcers,  ambassadors,  and  judges  are  often  drawn 
directly  from  the  corporation  law  ofiices,  the  partners  of  which 
welcome  the  opportunity  to  be  of  national  service.  Since  the  Civil 
War,  the  corporation  law  firms  have  contributed  many  justices 
to  the  United  States  Supreme  Court;  at  present  the  majority  of 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  127 

its  membeis  are  former  corporation  lawyers.  Lawyers  have  been 
in  politics  since  the  constitutional  period  but  today  the  lawyers 
from  law  factories  work  less  as  political  heroes  in  the  sunlight 
than  as  fixers  and  lobbyists  in  the  shade.  When  the  TNEC  in- 
vestigations were  going  on,  lawyers  for  the  big  corporations  took 
up  one  entire  hotel  in  Washington,  D.C. 

There  are  also,  of  course,  political  law  firms,  smaller  than  the 
law  factories,  which  draw  their  clients  from  the  political  world 
and  regularly  enter  that  world  themselves.  For  it  is  through  poli- 
tics that  the  lawyer  may  attain  a  position  on  the  bench.  Usually 
these  political  law  oflBces  have  only  local  political  interests. 
Whereas  corporate  law  factories  are  usually  headed  by  men  of 
Anglo-Scotch  stock,  these  political  offices,  mainly  in  the  north- 
east and  in  big  cities,  where  politics  often  centers  on  immigrant 
levels,  are  frequently  staffed  by  Irish,  Polish,  Jewish,  Italian 
Americans.  The  opportunism  of  these  smaller  firms  may  make 
them  appear  tolerant  and  liberal,  and  certainly  many  of  the 
partners  in  them  are  up  from  the  ranks. 

The  lawyer  uses  political  office  as  a  link  in  a  legal  career, 
and  the  politician  uses  legal  training  and  law  practice  as  links 
in  a  political  career.  Skills  of  pleading  and  bargaining  are  trans- 
ferable to  politics;  moreover,  in  exercising  them  as  a  lawyer, 
there  is  a  chance  to  obtain  politically  relevant  publicity.  The 
lawyer  is  occupationally  and  financially  mobile:  more  easily 
than  most  men,  he  can  earn  a  living  and  still  give  time  to  poli- 
tics. So  it  is  not  surprising  that  42  per  cent  of  the  members  of 
Congress  in  1914,  1920,  and  1926  and  of  state  governors  in  1920 
and  1924  had  been  prosecuting  attorneys;  and  of  these,  Ray- 
mond Moley  has  calculated,  94  per  cent  had  held  this  office 
first  or  second  in  their  political  careers.  Between  1790  and  1930, 
Willard  Hurst  has  computed,  two-thirds  of  the  Presidents  and 
of  the  U.S.  Senate,  and  about  half  of  the  House  of  Representa- 
tives were  lawyers. 

Below  the  corporation  law  offices  and  the  political  firms  are 
middle-sized  law  offices,  containing  from  3  to  20  partners  and 
few,  if  any,  associates.  These  offices,  especially  in  small  towns, 
are  rooted  in  the  local  affairs  of  their  business  communities, 
dividing  their  time  between  local  politics  and  the  practice  of 
local  litigations.  Finallv,  at  the  bottom  of  the  legal  pyramid  is 


128  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

the   genuine   entrepreneur   of  law,   the   individual  practitioner 
who  handles  the  legal   affairs   of  individuals   and  small  busi- 
nesses. At  the  lower  fringe  of  this  stratum,  in  the  big  cities  espe- 
cially, are  those  lawyers  who  live  'dangerously  close  to  the  crim- 
inal class.'  The  hierarchical  structure  of  the  legal  profession  is 
thus  not  confined  inside  the  big  offices;  it  is  characteristic  of  the 
profession  as  a  whole,  within  various  cities  as  well  as  nationally. 
In  most  cities,  the  legal  work  of  banks  and  local  industries, 
of  large  estates  and  well-to-do  families,  is  divided  among  a  few 
leading  law  firms,  whose  members  sit  on  the  boards  of  local 
banks  and  companies,  who  lead  church,  college,  and  charity 
affairs.  They  perpetuate  themselves  by  carefully  selecting  the 
most  likely  young  men  available  and  by  nepotism,  sons  of  rela- 
tives, of  partners,  and  of  big  clients  being  given  marked  pref- 
erence over  strangers,  local  graduates  of  local  law  schools  over 
outside  ones.  In  St.  Paul,  Minnesota,  for  example,  graduates  of 
Princeton  or  Yale  often  take  their  law  work  in  St.  Paul  Law 
School,  rather  than  in  the  University  of  Minnesota,  in  order  to 
become  acquainted  with  members  of  the  local  bar  who  act  as 
instructors.  Below  these  leading  firms,  the  small  firms  and  indi- 
vidual practitioners  get  the  business  that  is  left  over:  occasional 
cases  for  well-to-do  citizens,  the  plaintiff's  damage  suit,  criminal 
defense  cases,  divorce  work.   Below  all  these  groups  are  the 
lumpen-bourgeoisie  of  the  law  profession.  Usually  products  of 
local  schools,  they  haunt  the  courts  for  pickups;  large  in  num- 
ber, small  in  income,  living  in  the  interstices  of  the  legal-busi- 
ness  system,   besieging   the   larger   office   for   jobs,    competing 
among  themselves,  from  time  to  time  making  irritating  inroads 
into  the  middle-sized  firms,  lowering  the  dignity  of  the  profes- 
sion's higher  members  by  competing  for  retainers  instead  of 
conferring  a  favor  by  accepting  a  case.  Even  as  top  men  toady 
to  big  corporation  chieftains,  men  on  the  bottom  assiduously 
chase  ambulances  and  cajole  the  injured. 

Among  the  difficulties  that  have  arisen  for  lawyers  since  1929 
is  the  fact  that  laymen  are  invading  many  fields  that  were  long 
considered  the  lawyers'  domain.  Drafting  of  deeds  and  mort- 
gages has  been  taken  over  by  real-estate  men;  various  service 
organizations  have  taken  over  taxation  difficulties,  automobile 
accidents,  and  conditional  sales;  workmen's  compensation  now 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  129 

takes  care  of  many  industrial  accidents.  There  has  also  been  a 
declining  use  of  courts  and  litigation  methods  of  settling  con- 
troversies, caused  by  the  public  desire  for  speedy  settlements. 
Traditional  litigation  is  giving  way  to  a  system  of  administra- 
tive adjudication  in  which  the  lawyer  has  an  equal  footing  with 
the  layman.  Members  of  the  legal  profession  are  slowly  losing 
their  monopoly  of  political  careers,  as  men  trained  in  such  dis- 
ciplines as  economics  increasingly  find  their  way  into  higher 
government  oflSces. 

Yet,  despite  the  displacement  of  individual  practitioner  by 
legal  factory,  law  has  remained  enticing  to  many  young  men. 
Thousands  every  year  graduate  from  law  schools.  The  war  tem- 
porarily solved  the  problem  of  'crowding';  for  the  first  time 
since  the  early  'twenties,  law  schools  were  capable  of  finding 
jobs  for  each  graduate  as  enrollment  was  severely  cut  down  by 
the  draft.  But  the  bases  of  the  problem  for  young,  unconnected 
lawyers,  and  for  American  society,  still  remain. 

4.  The  Professors 

Schoolteachers,  especially  those  in  grammar  and  high  schools, 
are  the  economic  proletarians  of  the  professions.  These  outlying 
servants  of  learning  form  the  largest  occupational  group  of  the 
professional  pyramid;  some  31  per  cent  of  all  professional  peo- 
ple are  schoolteachers  of  one  sort  or  another.  Like  other  white- 
collar  groups,  their  number  has  expanded  enormously;  they 
have,  in  addition,  been  instrumental,  through  education,  in  the 
birth  and  growth  of  many  other  white-collar  groups. 

The  increase  in  enrollment  and  the  consequent  mass-produc- 
tion methods  of  instruction  have  made  the  position  of  the  col- 
lege professor  less  distinctive  than  it  once  was.  Although  its 
prestige,  especiaHy  in  the  larger  centers,  is  considerably  higher 
than  that  of  the  public-school  teacher,  it  does  not  usually  attract 
sons  of  cultivated  upper-class  families.  The  type  of  man  who  is 
recruited  for  college  teaching  and  shaped  for  this  end  by  grad- 
uate school  training  is  very  likely  to  have  a  strong  plebeian 
strain.  His  culture  is  typically  narrow,  his  imagination  often 
limited.  Men  can  achieve  position  in  this  field  although  they 
are  recruited  from  the  lower-middle  class,  a  milieu  not  remark- 


130  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

able  for  grace  of  mind,  flexibility  or  breadth  of  culture,  or  scope 
of  imagination.  The  profession  thus  includes  many  persons  who 
have  experienced  a  definite  rise  in  class  and  status  position, 
and  who  in  making  the  climb  are  more  likely,  as  Logan  Wilson 
has  put  it,  to  have  acquired  'the  intellectual  than  the  social 
graces/  It  also  includes  people  of  'typically  plebeian  cultural 
interests  outside  the  field  of  specialization,  and  a  generally  philis- 
tine  style  of  life/ 

Men  of  brilliance,  energy,  and  imagination  are  not  often  at- 
tracted to  college  teaching.  The  Arts  and  Sciences  graduate 
schools,  as  the  president  of  Harvard  has  indicated,  do  not  re- 
ceive 'their  fair  share  of  the  best  brains  and  well-developed, 
forceful  personalities.'  Law  and  medical  schools  have  done  much 
better.  It  is  easier  to  become  a  professor,  and  it  is  easier  to  con- 
tinue out  of  inertia.  Professions  such  as  law  and  medicine  oflFer 
few  financial  aids  by  way  of  fellowships,  while  that  of  teaching 
the  higher  learning  offers  many. 

The  graduate  school  is  often  organized  as  a  'feudal'  system: 
the  student  trades  his  loyalty  to  one  professor  for  protection 
against  other  professors.  The  personable  young  man,  willing  to 
learn  quickly  the  thought-ways  of  others,  may  succeed  as  readily 
or  even  more  readily  than  the  truly  original  mind  in  intensive 
contact  with  the  world  of  learning.  The  man  who  is  willing  to 
be  apprenticed  to  some  professor  is  more  useful  to  him. 

Under  the  mass  demand  for  higher  degrees,  the  graduate 
schools  have  expanded  enormously,  often  developing  a  me- 
chanically given  doctoral  degree.  Departmental  barriers  are 
accentuated  as  given  departments  become  larger  in  personnel 
and  budget.  Given  over  mainly  to  preparing  college  teachers, 
the  graduate  schools  equip  their  students  to  fulfil  one  special 
niche.  This  is  part  of  the  whole  vocationalizing  of  education— 
the  preparation  of  people  to  fulfil  technical  requirements  and 
skills  for  immediate  adjustment  to  a  job. 

The  specialization  that  is  required  for  successful  operation  as 
a  college  professor  is  often  deadening  to  the  mind  that  would 
grasp  for  higher  culture  in  the  modem  world.  There  now  is,  as 
Whitehead  has  indicated,  a  celibacy  of  the  intellect.  Often  the 
only  'generalization'  the  professor  permits  himself  is  the  text- 
book he  writes  in  the  field  of  his  work.  Such  serious  thought  as 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  131 

he  engages  in  is  thought  within  one  specialty,  one  groove;  the 
remainder  of  hfe  is  treated  superficially.  The  professor  of  social 
science,  for  example,  is  not  very  likely  to  have  as  balanced  an 
intellect  as  a  top-flight  journalist,  and  it  is  usually  considered 
poor  taste,  inside  the  academies,  to  write  a  book  outside  of  one's 
own  field.  The  professionalization  of  knowledge  has  thus  nar- 
rowed the  grasp  of  the  individual  professor;  the  means  of  his 
success  further  this  trend;  and  in  the  social  studies  and  the  hu- 
manities, the  attempt  to  imitate  exact  science  narrows  the  mind 
to  microscopic  fields  of  inquiry,  rather  than  expanding  it  to  em- 
brace man  and  society  as  a  whole.  To  make  his  mark  he  must 
specialize,  or  so  he  is  encouraged  to  believe;  so  a  college  faculty 
of  150  members  is  split  into  30  or  40  departments,  each  autono- 
mous, each  guarded  by  the  established  or,  even  worse,  the 
almost-established  man  who  fears  encroachment  or  consolidation 
of  his  specialty. 

After  he  is  established  in  a  college,  it  is  unlikely  that  the  pro- 
fessor's milieu  and  resources  are  the  kind  that  will  facilitate,  much 
less  create,  independence  of  mind.  He  is  a  member  of  a  petty 
hierarchy,  almost  completely  closed  in  by  its  middle-class  en- 
vironment and  its  segregation  of  intellectual  from  social  life.  In 
such  a  hierarchy,  mediocrity  makes  its  own  rules  and  sets  its 
own  image  of  success.  And  the  path  of  ascent  itself  is  as  likely 
to  be  administrative  duty  as  creative  work. 

But  the  shaping  of  the  professor  by  forces  inside  the  academy 
is  only  part  of  the  story.  The  U.S.  educational  system  is  not 
autonomous;  what  happens  in  it  is  quite  dependent  upon  changes 
in  other  areas  of  society.  Schools  are  often  less  centers  of  initia- 
tive than  adaptive  organisms;  teachers  are  often  less  independ- 
ent minds  than  low-paid  employees. 

External  circumstances  and  demands  have  affected  the  en- 
rollment and  curriculum  of  high  schools  and  colleges,  as  well  as 
the  types  of  teachers,  and  the  roles  they  play  within  and  out  of 
the  academy.  By  making  an  analogy  between  the  world  of  knowl- 
edge and  the  economic  system,  we  can  get  a  fuller  picture  of 
the  types  of  academic  men  who  people  U.S.  centers  of  higher 
learning. 


132  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

The  producer  is  the  man  who  creates  ideas,  first  sets  them 
forth,  possibly  tests  them,  or  at  any  rate  makes  them  available 
in  writing  to  those  portions  of  the  market  capable  of  understand- 
ing them.  Among  producers  there  are  individual  entrepreneurs- 
still  the  predominant  type— and  corporation  executives  in  research 
institutions  of  various  kinds  who  are  in  fact  administrators  over 
production  units.  Then  there  are  the  wholesalers,  who  while  they 
do  not  produce  ideas  do  distribute  them  in  textbooks  to  other 
academic  men,  who  in  turn  sell  them  directly  to  student  consum- 
ers. In  so  far  as  men  teach,  and  only  teach,  they  are  retailers  of 
ideas  and  materials,  the  better  of  them  being  serviced  by  original 
producers,  the  lesser,  by  wholesalers.  All  academic  men,  regard- 
less of  type,  are  also  consumers  of  the  products  of  others,  of  pro- 
ducers and  wholesalers  through  books,  and  of  retailers  to  some 
extent  through  personal  conversation  on  local  markets.  But  it  is 
possible  for  some  to  specialize  in  consumption:  these  become 
great  comprehenders,  rather  than  users,  of  books,  and  they  are 
great  on  bibliographies. 

In  most  colleges  and  universities,  all  these  types  are  repre- 
sented, all  may  flourish;  but  the  producer  (perhaps  along  with 
the  textbook  wholesaler)  has  been  honored  the  most. 

The  general  hierarchy  of  academic  standing  runs  from  the  full 
professor  in  a  graduate  school,  who  teaches  very  little  and  does 
much  research,  to  the  instructor  of  undergraduates,  who  teaches 
a  great  deal  and  does  little  or  no  research.  Getting  ahead  aca- 
demically means  attracting  students,  but  at  the  same  time  pursu- 
ing research  work— and  in  the  end,  especially  for  the  younger 
man,  publication  may  weigh  more  heavily  than  teaching  success. 
The  normal  academic  career  has  involved  a  hierarchy  within  an 
institution,  but  success  within  this  institution  draws  heavily  upon 
outside  success.  There  is  a  close  interaction  between  local  teach- 
ing, research  publication,  and  offers  from  other  institutions. 

In  the  twentieth  century,  academic  life  in  America  has  by  and 
large  failed  to  make  ambitious  men  contented  with  simple  aca- 
demic careers.  The  profession  carries  little  status  in  relation  to 
the  pecuniary  sacrifices  often  involved;  the  pay  and  hence  the 
style  of  life  is  often  relatively  meager;  and  the  discontent  of 
some  scholars  is  heightened  by  their  awareness  that  their  intelli- 
gence far  exceeds  that  of  men  who  have  attained  power  and  pres- 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  133 

tige  in  other  fields.  For  such  unhappy  professors,  new  devel- 
opments in  research  and  administration  offer  gratifying  op- 
portunities to  become,  so  to  speak,  Executives  without  having  to 
become  Deans. 

As  internal  academic  forces  turn  some  professors  into  retailers 
or  administrators,  external  forces  draw  others,  especially  in  the 
big  universities,  toward  careers  of  a  new  entrepreneurial  type. 

War  experience  has  indicated  that  the  professor  can  be  useful 
in  government  programs,  as  well  as  in  the  armed  forces.  But  it  is 
research  that  is  most  likely  to  get  him  out  of  the  academy  and 
into  other  life-situations.  It  is  also  in  connection  with  research, 
and  the  money  it  entails,  that  professors  become  more  directly 
an  appendage  of  the  larger  managerial  demiurge,  which  their 
professional  positions  allow  them  to  sanctify  as  well  as  to  serve  in 
more  technical  ways.  Since  knowledge  is  a  commodity  that  may 
be  sold  directly,  perhaps  it  is  inevitable  that  some  professors 
specialize  in  selling  knowledge  after  others  have  created  it,  and 
that  still  others  shape  their  intellectual  work  to  meet  the  market 
directly.  Like  the  pharmacist  who  sells  packaged  drugs  with 
more  authority  than  the  ordinary  storekeeper,  the  professor  sells 
packaged  knowledge  with  better  effect  than  laymen.  He  brings 
to  the  market  the  prestige  of  his  university  position  and  of  the 
ancient  academic  tradition  of  disinterestedness.  This  halo  of  dis- 
interestedness has  more  than  once  been  turned  to  the  interests 
of  companies  who  purchase  the  professor's  knowledge  and  the 
name  of  his  university. 

It  has  long  been  known,  of  course,  that  economics  has  been 
the  'Swiss  guard  of  the  vested  interests'— but  usually  from  some 
distance.  Now,  however,  many  top  professional  economists  are 
direct  agents  of  business.  Engineers  and  lawyers,  the  most  fre- 
quent professionals  found  in  the  service  of  advising  business,  are 
being  joined  by  academicians,  who  associate  with  management 
in  the  solution  of  policy  problems,  who  gauge  the  market  for 
products,  and  who  assay  opinions  about  the  firm  or  about  busi- 
ness in  general.  These  needs  have  increased  as  business  and 
trade  associations  have  become  larger  and  have  taken  up  the  role 
of  economic  statesmen  for  the  entire  economy.  For  these  organi- 
zations have  felt  the  need  of  spokesmen  for  their  new  roles, 
and  as  public  relations  has  become  a  top  management  concern, 


134  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

simple  hot  air  has  lost  ground  to  research,  carefully  prepared 
for  internal  and  external  uses.  This  has  meant  that  researchers 
of  some  talent  have  to  be  retained,  as  well  as  professors  from 
various  universities,  who  set  the  seal  of  their  universities  upon 
the  research  findings. 

The  new  academic  practicality,  in  the  social  studies,  for  in- 
stance, is  not  concerned  with  the  broken-up  human  results  of  the 
social  process:  the  bad  boy,  the  loose  woman,  the  uur American- 
ized immigrant.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  tied  in  with  the  top  levels 
of  society,  in  particular  with  enlightened  circles  of  business  ex- 
ecutives. For  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  their  disciphne,  for 
example,  sociologists  have  become  linked  by  professional  tasks 
and  social  contacts  with  private  and  public  powers  well  above 
the  level  of  the  social-work  agency.  Now,  alongside  the  old,  there 
are  the  new  practitioners  who  study  workers  who  are  restless  and 
lack  morale,  and  managers  who  do  not  understand  the  art  of 
managing  human  relations. 

Among  social  science  and  business  professors  in  three  or  four 
large  universities,  the  new  entrepreneurial  pattern  of  success  is 
well  under  way.  One  often  hears  in  these  centers  that  'the  pro- 
fessor does  everything  but  teach.'  He  is  a  consultant  to  large  cor- 
porations, real-estate  bodies,  labor-management  committees;  he 
has  built  his  own  research  shop,  from  which  he  sells  research 
services  and  the  prestige  of  his  university's  traditional  impar- 
tiality. He  becomes  a  man  with  a  staff— and  with  overhead.  It  is 
high  overhead  with  a  system  of  fees  for  given  jobs  that  causes 
his  business-like  frenzy.  The  fact  that  such  an  academic  entre- 
preneur is  not  usually  out  after  money  often  gives  the  outsider 
the  impression  that  the  professor  is  play-acting  at  business,  gain- 
ing prestige  because  of  his  own  eccentricity  and  low  personal 
income.  But  regardless  of  motives  or  consequences,  some  aca- 
demic careers  are  becoming  dependent  upon  the  traits  of  the  go- 
getter  in  business  and  the  manager  in  the  corporation. 

It  must  be  understood  that  all  this  is  still  exceptional,  certainly 
so  in  terms  of  the  number  of  professors  involved.  It  may  well  be 
seen  as  an  interlude,  for  on  the  one  side,  as  the  professorial  entre- 
preneur succeeds,  his  university  takes  over  what  he  has  built, 
turning  it  into  a  department  of  the  endowed  plant,  and  using  its 
reputation  to  get  more  respectable,  steady  money.  And  on  the 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  135 

Other  side,  the  orientation  and  technical  skills  taught  to  appren- 
tices enable  them  to  enter  the  corporations  and  government  bu- 
reaus as  professional  employees. 

In  contrast  with  businessmen  and  other  laymen,  the  professors 
are  probably  not  primarily  concerned  with  the  pecuniary,  the 
managerial,  or  the  political  uses  of  their  practicality.  Such  results 
are  to  them  primarily  means  to  other  ends  which  center  around 
their  'careers.'  It  is  true  that  professors  certainly  welcome  the 
small  increases  to  their  salaries  that  may  come  with  research 
activity:  they  may  or  may  not  feel  gratified  to  be  helping  man- 
agers administer  their  plant  more  profitably  and  with  less  trouble; 
they  may  or  may  not  be  powerfully  lifted  by  building  new  and 
more  intellectually  acceptable  ideologies  for  established  powers. 
But  in  so  far  as  they  remain  scholars,  their  extra-intellectual  aims 
center  around  furthering  their  careers. 

From  this  point  of  view,  the  professor's  participation  in  the 
new  ideological  and  practical  studies  is,  in  part,  a  response  to  the 
new  job  opportunities  arising  from  the  increased  scale  and  in- 
tensified bureaucratic  character  of  modern  business  and  govern- 
ment, and  from  the  institutionalization  of  the  relations  between 
business  corporations  and  the  rest  of  the  community.  Bureaucrati- 
zation brings  with  it  an  increased  demand  for  experts  and  the 
formation  of  new  career  patterns:  social  scientists  responding  to 
this  demand,  more  or  less  happily,  become  business  and  govern- 
ment officials,  on  higher  or  lower  levels.  The  centers  of  higher 
learning  themselves  reflect  this  outside  demand  for  scholars  by 
tending  increasingly  to  produce  supposedly  apoHtical  techni- 
cians, as  against  free  intellectuals.  Thus  college-trained  labor- 
relations  scholars  become  'experts'  and  serve  on  the  War  Labor 
Board,  rather  than  write  and  fight  for  radical  and/or  conserva- 
tive publics  and  for  the  public  dissemination  of  theoretical  ideas. 
In  this  connection,  modern  war  is  the  health  of  the  expert  and, 
particularly,  the  expert  in  the  rhetoric  of  liberal  justification. 

For  those  who  remain  in  academic  life  the  career  of  the  new 
entrepreneur  has  become  available.  This  type  of  man  is  able  to 
further  his  career  in  the  university  by  securing  prestige  and  small- 
scale  powers  outside  of  it.  Above  all,  he  is  able  to  set  up  on  the 
campus  a  respectably  financed  institute  that  brings  the  academic 
community  into  contact  with  men  of  affairs,  thus  often  becoming 


136  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

the  envy  of  his  more  cloistered  colleagues  and  looked  to  by  them 
for  leadership  in  university  affairs. 

Yet  there  is  evidence,  here  and  there,  even  among  the  youngest 
men  in  the  greatest  hurry,  that  these  new  careers,  while  lifting 
them  out  of  the  academic  rut,  may  have  dropped  them  into  some- 
thing which  in  its  way  is  at  least  as  unsatisfactory.  At  any  rate, 
the  new  academic  entrepreneurs  often  seem  unaware  just  what 
their  goals  may  be:  indeed,  they  do  not  seem  to  have  firmly  in 
mind  even  the  terms  in  which  possible  success  may  be  defined. 

As  a  group,  American  professors  have  seldom  if  ever  been 
politically  engaged:  the  trend  toward  a  technician's  role  has,  by 
strengthening  their  apolitical  professional  ideology,  reduced 
whatever  political  involvement  they  may  have  had  and  often, 
by  sheer  atrophy,  their  ability  even  to  grasp  political  problems. 
That  is  why  one  often  encounters  middle-rank  journalists  who 
are  more  politically  alert  than  top  sociologists,  economists,  or 
political  scientists. 

The  American  university  system  seldom  provides  political 
training— that  is,  how  to  gauge  what  is  going  on  in  the  general 
struggle  for  power  in  modem  society.  Social  scientists  have  had 
little  or  no  real  contact  with  such  insurgent  sections  of  the  com- 
munity as  exist;  there  is  no  left-wing  press  with  which  the  average 
academic  man  in  the  course  of  his  career  would  come  into  live 
contact;  there  is  no  movement  which  would  support  or  give  pres- 
tige, not  to  speak  of  jobs,  to  the  political  intellectual;  the  aca- 
demic community  has  few  roots  in  labor  circles.  This  vacuum 
means  that  the  American  scholar's  situation  allows  him  to  take 
up  the  new  practicality— in  effect  to  become  a  political  tool- 
without  any  shift  of  political  ideology  and  with  little  political 
guilt. 

5.   Business  and  the  Professions 

United  States  society  esteems  the  exercise  of  educated  skill, 
and  honors  those  who  are  professionally  trained;  it  also  esteems 
money  as  fact  and  as  symbol,  and  honors  those  who  have  a  lot 
of  it.  Many  professional  men  are  thus  at  the  intersection  of  these 
two  systems  of  value  and  many  businessmen  strive  to  add  the 
professional  to  the  pecuniary.  When  we  speak  of  the  commer- 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  137 

cialization  of  the  professions,  or  of  the  professionalization  of 
business,  we  point  to  the  conflict  or  the  merging  of  skill  and 
money.  Out  of  this  merging,  professions  have  become  more  like 
businesses,  and  businesses  have  become  more  like  professions. 
The  line  between  them  has  in  many  places  become  obscured, 
especially  as  businesses  have  become  big  and  have  hired  men  of 
the  established  professions. 

Yet,  in  so  far  as  both  business  and  the  professions  are  organized 
in  bureaucratic  structures,  the  present  differences  between  their 
individual  practitioners  are  not  great.  The  managerial  demiurge 
involves  both  business  and  the  professions,  and,  as  it  does  so, 
individuals  perform  duties  within  specific  ojBBces,  making  money 
for  the  organization  perhaps,  but  themselves  receiving  a  salary. 
For  the  salaried  agent  the  consequences  of  a  businesslike  decision 
react  not  directly  upon  his  own  bank  account,  but  upon  the  profit 
position  of  the  firm  for  which  he  works. 

If  more  and  more  businesses  and  occupations  in  America  are 
called  professions,  or  their  practitioners  try  to  behave  like  pro- 
fessionals, this  is  certainly  not,  as  has  been  claimed  by  Harold 
Laski,  because  of  any  'equalitarian'  urge,  either  on  the  part  of 
the  country  as  a  whole  or  on  the  part  of  the  established  profes- 
sions. It  is  most  crucially  a  result  of  the  fact  that  as  business  has 
become  enlarged  and  complicated,  the  skills  needed  to  operate 
it  become  more  diflBcult  to  acquire  through  an  apprenticeship. 
People  have  had  to  be  more  highly  trained,  and  often  very  spe- 
cialized. Business  has  thus  become  a  market  for  educated  labor; 
including  both  the  established  as  well  as  the  newer  professions, 
it  has  itself  come  to  educate  in  the  process  of  its  own  work. 

When,  as  is  happening  today,  special  training  for  selected  man- 
agers of  business  is  instituted,  and  when  such  training  becomes  a 
prerequisite  to  being  hired,  then  we  can  speak  of  business  as  a 
profession,  like  medicine  or  law.  Today  the  situation  is  quite 
mixed,  but  large  businesses  are  moving  in  this  direction. 

Increasingly  both  business  and  the  professions  are  being  ra- 
tionally organized,  so  that  the  'science  of  business'  arises  in  the 
schools  even  as  do  courses  in  'business  practice'  for  doctors  and 
lawyers.  Both  businessmen  and  professionals  strive  for  rationality 
of  the  social  machineries  in  which  they  work,  and  are  honored  if 
they  achieve  it.  Both  strive  to  become  looked  upon  as  experts  and 


138  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

to  be  so  judged,  within  a  narrowed  area  of  specific  competence. 
Both  are  masters  of  abstracted  human  relations,  whether  as  in 
business  they  see  a  customer,  or  in  the  professions  a  cHent  or  case. 

The  main  trend  is  for  the  bureaucratic  organization  of  business- 
men and  of  professionals  to  turn  both  into  bureaucrats,  profes- 
sionalized occupants  of  specified  offices  and  specialized  tasks.  It 
is  certainly  not  in  terms  of  'pecuniary  vs.  service,'  or  in  any  terms 
of  motivation,  that  business  and  the  professions  can  be  distin- 
guished. 

The  businessman,  it  has  been  thought,  egotistically  pursues  his 
self-interest,  whereas  the  professional  man  altruistically  serves 
the  interest  of  others.  Such  distinctions  do  prevail,  but,  as  Talcott 
Parsons  has  correctly  observed,  the  difference  is  not  between 
egotistic  self-interest  and  altruism.  It  is,  rather,  a  difference  in 
the  entrance  requirement,  as  this  bears  upon  specialized  train- 
ing; a  difference  in  the  way  the  professional  and  business  groups 
are  socially  organized  and  controlled;  and  a  difference  in  the 
rules  that  govern  the  internal  and  external  relations  of  the  mem- 
bers  of  each  group. 

If  professional  men  are  not  expected  to  advertise  (although 
some  of  them  do),  if  they  are  expected,  as  in  medicine  or  law, 
to  take  cases  in  need  regardless  of  credit  rating  (although  there 
is  wide  variation  on  this  point),  if  they  are  forbidden  to  com- 
pete with  one  another  for  clients  in  terms  of  costs  ( although  some 
do)— this  is  not  because  they  are  less  self-interested  than  busi- 
nessmen; it  is  because  they  are  organized,  in  a  guild-like  system, 
so  as  best  to  promote  long-run  self-interest.  It  does  not  matter 
whether  as  individuals  they  are  aware  of  this  as  a  social  fact  or 
understand  it  only  as  an  ethical  matter. 

So  effective  is  the  professional  ideology  of  altruistic  service 
that  businessmen,  especially  certain  types  of  small  traders,  are 
eagerly  engaged  in  setting  up  the  same  practices  of  non-compe- 
tition and  guild-like  closure.  Even  among  businessmen  who  are 
not  directly  involved  in  the  technicalities  of  modern  business 
bureaucracy,  there  is  the  urge  to  seem  professional  and  to  enjoy 
professional  privileges.  This,  first  of  all,  rests  upon  their  aspira- 
tions for  status:  the  'professional'  wears  a  badge  of  prestige.  Any 
position  that  is  'responsible  and  steady'  and,  above  all,  that  car- 
ries prestige  may  become  known,  or  at  least  promoted  by  its 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  139 

members,  as  a  profession.  Real-estate  men  become  realtors;  un- 
dertakers become  morticians;  advertising  men  and  public-rela- 
tions counsels,  radio  commentators  and  gag  men,  interior  deco- 
rators and  special-effects  experts  all  try  to  look  and  act  'profes- 
sional.' This  trend  is  allowed  and  encouraged,  if  not  implemented, 
by  the  fact  that  business  functions,  and  so  businessmen,  are  often 
accorded  so  high  a  status  that  they  can  'borrow'  the  status  adher- 
ing to  other  pursuits.  If  the  professions  are  honorific,  the  business- 
man reasons,  then  business  should  be  a  profession. 

One  method  of  achieving  this  status,  as  well  as  of  increasing 
income  and  warding  off  competition,  is  to  close  up  the  ranks 
without  forming  labor  unions,  to  form  professional  associations 
which  limit  entrance  to  the  fields  of  profits  and  fees.  It  was  not 
until  the  'seventies  that  the  first  state  bar  examinations  were  in- 
stalled and  medical  licensing  was  begun;  accountants,  architects, 
and  engineers  were  licensed  at  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth 
century.  But  by  the  1930's,  according  to  Willard  Hurst's  count  in 
18  representative  states,  some  210  occupations  or  businesses  had 
come  under  some  sort  of  legal  closure. 

The  chief  stock  in  trade,  for  example,  of  pharmacists  as  small 
businessmen  is  their  status,  however  anomalous,  as  professional 
men.  Their  professional  claims  and  prestige  encourage  the  con- 
sumer's confidence  in  the  goods  they  sell;  and,  as  one  business 
journal  asserts,  'their  legal  franchise  as  professional  dispensers 
of  health  products  enables  them  to  stay  open  and  sell  non-drug 
products  at  odd  times— Sundays,  holidays,  at  night— when  other 
stores  are  closed.'  The  professional  basis  of  pharmacists,  however, 
has  been  slipping,  because  packaged  drug  sales  have  increased, 
while  prescription  sales  have  declined. 

The  economic  meaning  of  the  pharmacists'  claims  to  profes- 
sional status  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  will  lose  many  drug  sales 
unless  restrictive  laws  limit  such  sales  to  registered  pharmacists. 
In  part  at  least,  the  professional  cry  of  the  pharmacist  is  the  eco- 
nomic cry  of  a  small  businessman  against  drug  manufacturers 
who  desire  broader  outlets.  Small  druggists  often  consider  it 
highly  unethical,  even  as  do  doctors,  to  compete  in  terms  of  the 
prices  of  retail  price-maintained  goods.  They,  too,  would  like  a 
professional  closure  and  'professional  standing.'  In  the  extreme 
case,  ostracism  and  expulsion  are  used  to  uphold  the  rules  of  the 


140  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

guild  in  a  society  dominated  by  the  acquisition  and  guarantee  of 
profit.  The  balance  between  wise  restraint  and  commercial  ad- 
vantage is  uneasy,  the  line  between  them  diflBcult  to  draw. 

The  merging  type  of  professional-and-businessman  seeks  to  be 
and  often  is  an  entrepreneur  who  can  exploit  special  privileges. 
Among  these  is  the  use  of  both  business  and  professional  bu- 
reaucracies. The  professor  sells  the  prestige  of  his  university  to 
secure  market-research  jobs  in  order  to  build  a  research  unit;  he 
is  privileged  over  commercial  agencies  because  of  his  connection 
with  the  university.  The  doctor  who  is  connected  with  the  hos- 
pital secures  patients  as  well  as  the  use  of  equipment  because  of 
his  connection.  The  lawyer,  in  his  shuttles  between  one  business 
and  another,  and  between  business  and  government,  borrows 
prestige  from  both. 

Like  other  privileged  groups,  the  professional  entrepreneurs 
and  the  entrepreneurial  professionals  seek  to  monopolize  their 
positions  by  closing  up  their  ranks;  they  seek  to  do  so  by  law  and 
by  stringent  rules  of  education  and  entrance.  Whenever  there  is 
a  feeling  of  declining  opportunity,  occupational  groups  will  seek 
such  closure.  That  strategy  is  now  back  of  many  of  the  rules  and 
policies  adopted  by  professional  associations  as  well  as  by  busi- 
nessmen who  seek  to  claim  professional  status. 

The  ingenious  bureaucracies  among  professionals,  the  increased 
volumes  of  work  demanded  of  them,  the  coincidence  of  the 
managerial  demiurge  with  commercial  zeal,  and  all  the  policies 
and  attempts  on  the  part  of  professional  and  business  groups  to 
close  up  their  ranks— these  developments  are  alienating  the  indi- 
vidual, free  intelligence  from  many  white-collared  professionals. 
Individual  reflection  is  being  centralized,  sometimes  at  the  top, 
more  often  just  next  to  the  top,  as  there  are  jobs  requiring  and 
monopolizing  more  of  it,  and,  down  the  white-collar  line,  jobs 
requiring  or  allowing  less  of  it. 

The  centralization  of  planful  reflection  and  the  consequent  ex- 
propriation of  individual  rationality  parallel  the  rationalization 
of  the  white-collar  hierarchy  as  a  whole.  What  a  single  individual 
used  to  do  is  now  broken  up  into  functions  of  decision  and  re- 
search, direction  and  checking  up,  each  performed  by  a  separate 
group  of  individuals.  Many  executive  functions  are  thus  becom- 


OLD  PROFESSIONS  AND  NEW  SKILLS  ]4T 

ing  less  autonomous  and  permitting  less  initiative.  The  centrali- 
zation of  reflection  entails  for  many  the  deprivation  of  initiative: 
for  them,  decision  becomes  the  application  of  fixed  rules.  Yet 
these  developments  do  not  necessarily  mean  that  the  top  men 
have  less  intellectual  tasks  to  perform;  they  mean  rather,  as  Henri 
de  Man  has  observed,  that  the  less  intellectual  tasks  are  broken 
up  and  transferred  down  the  hierarchy  to  the  semi-skilled  white- 
collar  employees,  while  the  managerial  top  becomes  even  more 
intellectualized,  and  the  unit  of  its  intellectuality  becomes  a  set 
of  specialized  staffs.  The  more  those  down  the  line  are  deprived 
of  intellectual  content  in  their  work,  the  more  those  on  top  need 
to  be  intellectualized,  or  at  least  the  more  dependent  they  be- 
come upon  the  intellectually  skilled. 

If  in  this  process  some  professionals  are  forced  down  the  line, 
more  of  those  who  take  on  the  new  subaltern  intellectual  tasks 
come  from  lower  down  the  social  scale.  For  the  centralization 
of  professional  skills  and  the  industrialization  of  many  intel- 
lectual functions  have  not  narrowed  the  full  professional  stratum 
so  much  as  proliferated  the  semi-professions  and  the  quasi-intel- 
lectual, and  between  these  and  the  fully  professional,  created  a 
more  marked  separation.  So  great  has  the  expansion  been  that 
children  of  the  wage-worker  and  the  clerk  are  often  raised  into 
semi-professional  status,  while  top  men  of  the  professional  world 
merge  with  business  and  become  professional  entrepreneurs  of 
the  managerial  demiurge. 


7 


Brains,  Inc. 


WF  all  middle-class  groups,  intellectuals  are  the  most  far-flung 
and  heterogeneous.  Unlike  small  businessmen,  factory  workers, 
or  filing  clerks,  intellectuals  have  been  relatively  classless.  They 
have  no  common  origin  and  share  no  common  social  destiny. 
They  differ  widely  in  income  and  in  status;  some  live,  residen- 
tially  and  intellectually,  in  suburban  slums;  others,  in  propa- 
ganda bureaus  of  continent-wide  nations.  Many  intellectuals  are 
members  of  the  old  middle  class;  they  work  a  specialized  market 
made  up  of  editors  and  business  managers,  as  entrepreneurs  us- 
ing their  education  and  their  verbal  skills  as  capital.  Others  are 
primarily  new  middle  class:  their  styles  of  life  and  of  work  are 
set  by  their  position  as  salaried  employees  in  various  white-collar 
pyramids. 

Many  professional  people,  by  virtue  of  their  education  and 
leisure,  have  a  good  chance  to  become  intellectuals,  and  many 
intellectuals  earn  their  living  by  practicing  some  profession. 
Moreover,  people  of  professional  skills  form  a  substantial  pro- 
portion of  the  intellectuals'  public.  So  what  happens  to  profes- 
sional and  technical  groups  also  affects  the  intellectuals'  condi- 
tions of  work  and  life. 

Intellectuals  cannot  be  defined  as  a  single  social  unit,  but 
rather  as  a  scattered  set  of  grouplets.  They  must  be  defined  in 
terms  of  their  function  and  their  subjective  characteristics  rather 
than  in  terms  of  their  social  position:  as  people  who  specialize 
in  symbols,  the  intellectuals  produce,  distribute,  and  preserve 
distinct  forms  of  consciousness.  They  are  the  immediate  carriers 

142 


BRAINS,  INC.  143 

of  art  and  of  ideas.  They  may  have  no  direct  responsibihty  for 
any  practice;  or,  being  engaged  in  institutional  roles,  they  may 
be  firmly  attached  to  going  institutions.  They  may  be  onlookers 
and  outsiders,  or  overseers  and  insiders;  but  however  that  may 
be,  as  intellectuals  they  are  people  who  live  for  and  not  o§  ideas. 

Seeking  to  cultivate  a  sense  of  individual  mind,  they  have 
been,  in  their  self-images,  detached  from  popular  values  and 
stereotypes,  and  they  have  not  been  consciously  beholden  to 
anyone  for  the  fixing  of  their  beliefs.  A  remark  William  Phillips 
made  of  modern  literature  applies  equally  well  to  intellectuals: 
they  have  been  in  'recoil  from  the  practices  and  values  of  society 
toward  some  form  of  self-sufficiency,  be  it  moral,  or  physical,  or 
merely  historical,  with  repeated  fresh  starts  from  the  bohemian 
underground  as  each  new  movement  runs  itself  out.  .  .'  They 
are  thus  'in  a  kind  of  permanent  mutiny  against  the  regime  of 
utility  and  conformity.  .  .'  All  these  elements  of  'freedom'  hold 
for  political  as  well  as  artistic  intellectuals.  All  intellectual  work 
is,  in  fact,  relevant  in  so  far  as  it  is  focused  upon  symbols  that 
justify,  debunk,  or  divert  attention  from  authority  and  its  exer- 
cise. Political  intellectuals  are  specialized  dealers  in  such  sym- 
bols and  states  of  political  consciousness;  they  create,  facilitate, 
and  criticize  the  beliefs  and  ideas  that  support  or  attack  ruling 
classes,  institutions  and  policies;  or  they  divert  attention  from 
these  structures  of  power  and  from  those  who  command  and 
benefit  from  them  as  going  concerns. 

For  a  brief  liberal  period  in  western  history,  many  intellec- 
tuals were  free  in  the  sense  mentioned.  They  were  in  a  some- 
what unique  historical  situation,  even  as  the  situation  of  the 
small  entrepreneur  was  unique:  one  historic  phase  sandwiched  be- 
tween two  more  highly  organized  phases.  The  eighteenth-century 
intellectual  stood  on  common  ground  with  the  bourgeois  entre- 
preneur; both  were  fighting,  each  in  his  own  way,  against  the 
remnants  of  feudal  control,  the  writer  seeking  to  free  himself 
from  the  highly  placed  patron,  the  businessman  breaking  the 
bonds  of  the  chartered  enterprise.  Both  were  fighting  for  a  new 
kind  of  freedom,  the  writer  for  an  anonymous  public,  the  busi- 
nessman for  an  anonymous  and  unbounded  market.  It  was  their 
victory  which  Philip  Rahv  describes  when  he  says  that  'during 
the  greater  part  of  the  bourgeois  epoch  .  .  .  [the  artist]  pre- 


144  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

ferred  alienation  from  the  community  to  alienation  from  him- 
self,' But  no  longer  are  such  conditions  of  freedom  available  for 
the  entrepreneur  or  the  intellectual,  and  nowhere  has  its  col- 
lapse for  intellectuals  been  more  apparent  than  in  twentieth- 
century  America. 


1.  Four  Phases 

The  practice  of  a  free  intellectual  life  has  in  the  course  of 
this  century  undergone  several  transformations  and  come  up 
against  several  rather  distinct  sets  of  circumstance.  To  follow 
these  changes  it  is  necessary  to  examine  shifting  models  of 
thought  and  mood  and  to  track  down  intangible  influences. 
Throughout  this  century  there  has  arisen  a  new  kind  of  patron- 
age system  for  free  intellectuals,  which  at  mid-century  seems 
to  have  eflFected  a  loss  of  political  will  and  even  of  moral  hope. 

An  over-simplified  history  of  free,  political  intellectuals  in  the 
United  States  falls  into  four  broad  phases,  outlined  according 
to  their  major  areas  of  attention  and  their  pivotal  values. 

I.  Before  World  War  I,  the  liberalism  of  pragmatic  thought 
was  widespread  among  muckrakeis,  who  individually  sought 
out  the  facts  of  injustice  and  corruption  and  reported  them  to 
the  middle  class.  In  the  first  decade  and  a  half  of  the  century, 
these  intellectuals  as  muckrakers  had  a  firm  base  in  a  mass 
public;  in  magazines  like  McCliire's  they  could  operate  as  free- 
lance journalists,  focusing  on  specific  cities  and  specific  busi- 
nesses. In  that  expanding  society,  with  new  routines  and  groups 
arising,  these  intellectuals  were  sometimes  overwhelmed  by 
the  need  for  sheer  description,  but  they  were  critical  journal- 
ists, having  a  vested  interest  in  attack  on  established  corruption, 
in  a  kind  of  ethical  bookkeeping  for  the  old  middle-class  world. 

In  fact,  muckraking  attacks  were  thought  or  were  feared  to 
be  so  effective  that,  in  reflex  fashion,  men  of  power  hired  pub- 
licity agents  to  defend  their  authority  and  their  public  images. 
Some  of  these  publicity  agents  were  at  least  in  the  beginning 
intellectuals:  it  is,  in  fact,  characteristic  of  intellectuals  that 
they  are  able  to  attach  themselves  to  the  defense  and  elabora- 
tion of  almost  any  social  interest.  By  World  War  I,  many  who 


BRAINS,  INC.  145 

had  been  muckrakers  took  up  the  defense  of  a  new  synthetic 
faith  that  was  being  created  for  the  vested  interests.  The  very 
magazines  for  which  the  muckrakers  wrote,  Wilham  Miller  has 
shown,  were  in  due  course  transformed  into  carefully  guarded 
advertising  media  of  enormous  circulation. 

The  muckrakers  did  not,  of  course,  monopolize  the  intellec- 
tual scene.  Centered  in  Henry  Adams'  house  in  Washington, 
D.C.,  and  in  the  circles  of  strenuous  idea-men  like  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  there  was  a  conservative  elite  who  also  were  critical 
of  crass  capitalism,  but  in  a  gentlemanly  manner,  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  patrician  rentier.  The  muckrakers  and  con- 
servatives did  not  long  remain  free  or  retain  any  unity:  pre- 
cisely because  of  their  multiplicity  of  origin  and  interests,  and 
their  social  heterogeneity,  it  was  not  difficult  for  them  to  take 
the  different  directions  and  join  the  different  classes  or  parties 
that  they  did. 

II.  The  range  of  styles  for  intellectuals  available  in  the  'twen- 
ties, as  they  'attempted  to  reconcile  themselves  to  the  brokers' 
world,'  has  been  well-described  by  Edmund  Wilson:  'the  atti- 
tude of  the  Menckenian  gentleman,  ironic,  beer-loving  and 
"civilized,"  living  principally  on  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  su- 
perior to  the  broker  and  enjoying  the  debauchment  of  American 
life  as  a  burlesque  show;  the  attitude  of  the  old-American- 
stock  smugness  .  .  .  the  liberal  attitude  that  American  capitalism 
was  going  to  show  a  new  wonder  to  the  world  by  gradually 
and  comfortably  socializing  itself  and  that  we  should  just  have 
to  respect  and  like  it  in  the  meantime,  taking  a  great  interest  in 
Dwight  Morrow  and  Owen  D.  Young;  the  attitude  of  trying  to 
get  a  kick  out  of  the  sheer  energy  and  size  of  American  enter- 
prises, irrespective  of  what  they  were  aiming  at;  the  attitude  of 
proudly  withdrawing  and  cultivating  a  refined  sensibility;  the 
attitude  of  letting  one's  self  be  carried  along  by  the  mad  hilarity 
and  tragedy  of  jazz,  of  living  only  for  the  excitement  of  the 
night.' 

What  all  these  attitudes  have  in  common  is  an  apolitical  tone, 
or  a  cultivated  relaxation  into  a  soft  kind  of  liberalism,  which 
relieved  political  tension  and  dulled  political  perception.  The  in- 


146  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

tellectuals  diverted  public  attention  from  major  political  symbols, 
even  as  they  broke  cultural  and  social  idols.  Many  rejected  mid- 
dle-western America  for  the  eastern  cities  and,  in  fact,  all  America 
for  Europe,  but  their  revolt  was  esthetic  and  literary  rather  than 
explicitly  political.  It  was  an  enthusiastic  revolt  against  'provin- 
cial' regional  hankerings,  against  social  and  ideological  propria 
eties,  against  gentility  in  all  forms. 

m.  For  a  while,  during  the  'thirties,  there  was  a  widespread 
model  of  the  intellectual  as  political  agent.  Some  of  the  most 
talented  free  intellectuals  played  at  being  Leninist  men.  They 
joined  or  traveled  with  splinter  parties,  with  first  the  Third  and 
then  the  Fourth  International;  they  wrote  in  support  of  the  gen- 
eral ideas  and  policies  current  in  these  circles. 

For  the  first  several  decades  of  this  century,  pragmatism  was 
the  nerve  of  leftward  thinking.  By  the  nineteen-thirties,  as  prag- 
matism as  such  began  to  decline  as  a  common  denominator  of 
liberalism,  its  major  theme  was  given  new  hfe  by  a  fashionable 
Marxism.  One  idea  ran  through  both  ideologies:  the  optimistic 
faith  in  man's  rationality.  In  pragmatism  this  rationality  was  for- 
mally located  in  the  individual;  in  Marxism  in  a  class  of  men; 
but  in  both  it  was  a  motif  so  dominant  as  to  set  the  general  mood. 

In  Marx's  theory  of  historical  change,  as  modified  by  Lenin, 
the  intellectual  supplemented  the  proletariat.  Only  if  these  gad- 
flies, bearing  the  idea,  joined  the  movement  as  its  heroic  van- 
guard would  the  workers  make  a  new  world— or  at  least  so  did 
many  U.S.  intellectuals  interpret  Leninism. 

Some  few  joined  the  organizing  sta£Fs  of  unions,  becoming  jour- 
nalists and  publicity  agents,  to  gauge  when  the  time  was  ripe— 
although  none  became  firmly  attached  to  the  labor  movement 
without  ceasing  to  be  intellectuals.  But  also  novelists,  critics,  and 
poets,  historians,  both  academic  and  free-lance— the  leading  in- 
tellectuals—became political,  went  left.  If  they  broke  away  from 
the  Communist  party,  as  members  or  as  fellow  travelers,  still  they 
remained  radical,  as  Trotskyist  intellectuals  or  as  independent 
leftists.  For  a  time,  all  live  intellectual  work  was  derived  from 
leftward  circles  or  spent  its  energy  defending  itself  against  left 
views. 


BRAINS,  INC.  147 

IV.  With  the  war  came  a  period  of  dehberation.  Intellectuals 
broke  with  the  old  radicalism  and  became  in  one  way  or  another 
liberals  and  patriots,  or  gave  up  politics  altogether.  Dwight  Mac- 
donald  has  observed  how  religious  obscurantists,'  who  returned 
to  precapitalist  values,  and  'totalitarian  liberals,'  who  accepted 
the  process  of  rationalization,  trying  to  make  of  it  a  positive 
thing,  came  forth,  bringing  with  them  a  strong  effort  to  de-politi- 
cize the  war  in  every  respect.  And,  as  James  Farrell  has  pointed 
out,  a  'metaphysics  of  the  war'  was  necessary:  in  the  name  of 
the  American  past  such  men  as  Brooks,  MacLeish,  and  Mumford, 
oflBcial  spokesmen  of  the  war  ideology,  provided  it.  Intellectuals 
who  remained  free,  who  scorned  the  new  metaphysics,  were  still 
much  affected  by  it  because  it  had  the  initiative,  even  as  big  busi- 
ness gained  the  initiative  inside  the  war  agencies:  WPA  became 
WPB  for  many  businessmen  and  for  many  intellectuals. 

In  the  effort  to  discuss  but  not  face  up  to  the  irresponsibilities 
and  sustaining  deceptions  of  modern  society  at  war,  the  publi- 
cists called  upon  images  of  the  Future.  But  even  the  production 
of  Utopias  seemed  to  be  controlled,  monopolized  by  adjuncts  of 
big  business,  who  set  the  technological  trap  by  dangling  baubles 
before  the  public  without  telling  how  those  goods  might  be 
widely  distributed.  Political  writers  focused  attention  away  from 
the  present  and  into  the  several  planful  models  of  the  future, 
drawn  up  as  sources  of  unity  and  morale.  'Post-war  planning,' 
with  emphasis  upon  the  coming  technological  marvels,  was  the 
chief  intellectual  form  of  war  propaganda  in  America. 

Few  intellectuals  arose  to  protest  against  the  war  on  political 
or  moral  grounds,  and  the  prosperity  after  the  war,  in  which  in- 
tellectuals shared,  was  for  them  a  time  of  moral  slump.  They 
have  not  returned  to  politics,  much  less  turned  left  again,  and  no 
new  generation  has  yet  moved  into  their  old  stations.  With  this 
disintegration  has  gone  political  will;  in  its  place  there  is  hope- 
lessness. Among  U.S.  intelligentsia,  as  all  over  the  world,  Lionel 
Trilling  has  remarked,  the  'political  mind  lies  passive  before 
action  and  the  event  .  .  .  we  are  in  the  hands  of  the  com- 
mentator.' 

Since  the  war  years,  the  optimistic,  rational  faith  has  obvi- 
ously been  losing  out  in  competition  with  more  tragic  views  of 
political  and  personal  life.  Many  who  not  long  ago  read  Dewey 


148  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

or  Marx  with  apparent  satisfaction  have  become  more  vitally  in- 
terested in  such  analysts  of  personal  tragedy  as  Soren  Kierkegaard 
or  such  mirrors  of  hopeless  baflBement  as  Kafka.  Attempts  to  re- 
instate the  old  emphasis  on  the  power  of  man's  intelligence  to 
control  his  destiny  have  not  been  taken  up  by  American  intel- 
lectuals, spurred  as  they  are  by  new  worries,  seeking  as  they  are 
for  new  gods.  Suffering  the  tremors  of  men  who  face  defeat,  they 
are  worried  and  distraught,  some  only  half  aware  of  their  condi- 
tion, others  so  painfully  aware  that  they  must  obscure  their 
knowledge  by  rationalistic  busy-work  and  many  forms  of  self- 
deception. 

No  longer  can  they  read,  without  smirking  or  without  bitter- 
ness, Dewey's  brave  words,  'Every  thinker  puts  some  portion  of 
an  apparently  stable  world  in  peril,'  or  Bertrand  Russell's 
'Thought  looks  into  the  face  of  hell  and  is  not  afraid,'  much  less 
Marx's  notion  that  the  role  of  the  philosopher  was  not  to  inter- 
pret but  to  change  the  world.  Now  they  hear  Charles  Peguy:  'No 
need  to  conceal  this  from  ourselves:  we  are  defeated.  For  ten 
years,  for  fifteen  years,  we  have  done  nothing  but  lose  ground. 
Today,  in  the  decline,  in  the  decay  of  political  and  private  morals, 
literally  we  are  beleaguered.  We  are  in  a  place  which  is  in  a  state 
of  siege  and  more  than  blockaded  and  all  the  flat  country  is  in 
the  hands  of  the  enemy.'  What  has  happened  is  that  the  terms  of 
acceptance  of  American  life  have  been  made  bleak  and  super- 
ficial at  the  same  time  that  the  terms  of  revolt  have  been  made 
vulgar  and  irrelevant.  The  malaise  of  the  American  intellectual 
is  thus  the  malaise  of  a  spiritual  void. 

The  political  failure  of  intellectual  nerve  is  no  simple  retreat 
from  reason.  The  ideas  current  among  intellectuals  are  not  merely 
fads  of  an  epoch  of  world  wars  and  slumps.  The  creation  and 
diffusion  of  ideas  and  moods  must  be  understood  as  social  and 
historical  phenomena.  What  is  happening  is  not  entirely  ex- 
plained, however,  by  the  political  defeat  and  internal  decay  of 
radical  parties.  The  loss  of  will  and  even  of  ideas  among  intel- 
lectuals must  in  the  first  instance  be  seen  in  terms  of  their  self- 
images,  which  have  in  turn  been  anchored  in  social  movements 
and  political  trends.  To  understand  what  has  been  happening  to 
American  intellectual  life  we  have  to  go  beyond  the  decline  of 
radical  movements  and  of  Marxism  as  a  packaged  intellectual 


BRAINS,  INC.  149 

option,  and  realize  the  effects  upon  the  carriers  of  intellectual  life 
of  certain  deep-lying,  long-term  trends  of  modern  social  and  ideo- 
logical organization. 

2.  The  Bureaucratic  Context 

Bureaucracy  increasingly  sets  the  conditions  of  intellectual  life 
and  controls  the  major  market  for  its  products.  The  new  bureauc- 
racies of  state  and  business,  of  party  and  voluntary  association, 
become  the  major  employers  of  intellectuals  and  the  main  cus- 
tomers for  their  work.  So  strong  has  this  demand  for  technical 
and  ideological  intelligentsia  of  all  sorts  become  that  it  might 
even  be  said  that  a  new  patronage  system  of  a  complicated  and 
sometimes  indirect  kind  has  arisen.  Not  only  the  New  Deal,  Hol- 
lywood, and  the  Luce  enterprises,  but  business  concerns  of  the 
most  varied  types,  as  well  as  that  curious  set  of  institutions 
clustering  around  Stalinism,  have  come  to  play  an  important  role 
in  the  cultural  and  marketing  life  of  the  intellectual.  The  Young 
&  Rubicam  mentality  is  not  confined  to  Young  and  Rubicam; 
there  are  wider  groupings  which  have  become  adjuncts  of  the 
marketeers  and  which  display  the  managing  mentality  and  style 
of  those  who  sell  systematically. 

The  'opinion-molding  profession,'  Elliot  Cohen  has  observed, 
'is  a  tight  little  community,  inhabiting  a  small  territory  four 
blocks  wide  and  ten  or  so  blocks  long  centering  around  Radio 
City,  with  business  suburbs  of  the  same  narrow  geographical 
dimensions  in  Hollywood  and  Chicago.  .  .'  But  its  reach  is  wide: 
at  the  top,  the  communications  intellectuals  (idea  men,  techni- 
cians, administrators)  blend  with  the  managerial  demiurge  in 
more  concrete  businesses.  Indeed,  the  styles  of  work  and  life  of 
intellectuals  and  managers,  as  well  as  their  dominating  interests, 
coincide  at  many  points.  In  and  around  these  managed  structures 
are  intellectuals  who,  given  the  modern  dominance,  must  now  be 
considered  as  hold-outs.  And  between  the  two  there  is  much 
traffic. 

For  the  intellectual  who  would  remain  free  yet  still  seek  a 
public,  this  general  trend  is  sharpened  by  the  fact  that,  in  a  bu- 
reaucratic world  of  organized  irresponsibility,  the  difficulty  of 
speaking  one's  mind  in  dissent  has  increased.  Between  the  intel- 


150  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

lectual  and  his  potential  public  stand  technical,  economic,  and 
social  structures  which  are  owned  and  operated  by  others.  The 
medium  of  pamphlets  oflFered  to  Tom  Paine  a  direct  channel  to 
readers  that  the  world  of  mass  advertising-supported  publica- 
tions clearly  cannot  afford  to  provide  the  dissenter.  If  the  intel- 
lectual becomes  the  hired  man  of  an  information  industry,  his 
general  aims  must,  of  course,  be  set  by  the  decisions  of  others 
rather  than  by  his  own  integrity.  If  he  is  working  for  such  indus- 
tries on  a  'putting-out'  basis,  he  is  of  course  only  one  short  step 
from  the  hired-man  status,  although  in  his  case  manipulation 
rather  than  authority  may  be  exercised.  The  freedom  of  the  free- 
lance is  minimized  when  he  goes  to  market,  and  if  he  does  go, 
his  freedom  is  without  public  value. 

Even  craftsmanship,  so  central  to  intellectual  and  artistic  grati- 
fication, is  thwarted  for  an  increasing  number  of  intellectual 
workers  who  find  themselves  in  the  predicament  of  the  Holly- 
wood writer.  Unlike  the  Broadway  playwright  who  retains  at 
least  some  command  over  his  play  when  the  manager,  director, 
and  cast  take  it  over,  the  Hollywood  script  writer  has  no  assur- 
ance that  what  he  writes  will  be  produced  in  even  recognizable 
form.  His  work  is  bent  to  the  ends  of  mass  effects  to  sell  a  mass 
market;  and  his  major  complaint,  as  Robert  E.  Sherwood  has 
said,  is  not  that  he  is  underpaid,  but  that  while  he  has  responsi- 
bility for  his  work  he  has  no  real  authority  over  it. 

The  themes  of  mass  literature  and  entertainment,  of  pulps  and 
slicks,  of  radio  drama  and  television  script,  are  thus  set  by  the 
editor  or  director.  The  writer  merely  fills  an  order,  and  often  he 
will  not  write  at  all  until  he  has  an  order,  specifying  content, 
slant,  and  space  limits.  Even  the  editor  of  the  mass  magazine, 
the  director  of  the  radio  drama,  has  not  escaped  the  depersonali- 
zation of  publishing  and  entertainment;  he  is  also  the  employee 
of  a  business  enterprise,  not  a  personality  in  his  own  right.  Mass 
magazines  and  radio  shows  are  not  so  much  edited  by  a  per- 
sonality as  regulated  by  an  adroit  formula. 

With  the  general  speed-up  of  the  literary  industry  and  the  ad- 
vent of  go-getters  in  publishing,  the  character  of  book  publishing 
has  changed.  Writers  have  always  been  somewhat  limited  by  the 
taste  and  mentality  of  their  readers,  but  the  variety  and  levels  to 
which  the  publishing  industry  was  geared  made  possible  a  large 


BRAINS,  INC.  151 

amount  of  freedom.  Recent  changes  in  the  mass  distribution  of 
books  may  very  well  require,  .as  do  the  production  and  distribu- 
tion of  films,  a  more  cautious,  standardized  product.  It  is  likely 
that  fewer  and  fewer  publishers  will  handle  more  and  more  of 
those  manuscripts  which  reach  mass  publics  through  large-scale 
channels  of  distribution. 

The  rationalization  of  literature  and  the  commercialization  of 
the  arts  began  in  the  sphere  of  distribution.  Now  it  reaches 
deeper  and  deeper  into  the  productive  aspects.  'We  seldom  stop 
to  think,'  wrote  Henry  Seidel  Canby,  in  1933,  Tiow  strange  it  is 
that  literature  has  become  an  industry.  .  .  Everything  is  taken 
care  of  ...  in  the  widely  ramified  organizations  [of]  the  pub- 
lishing houses  and  the  agencies  .  .  .  [the  author's]  name  is  down 
.  .  .  and  the  diplomacy  department  dispatches  bright  young  en- 
\oys  to  them  at  brisk  intervals.  They  are  part  of  the  organization 
now.'  So  also  the  book  editors,  who  increasingly  become  members 
of  a  semi-anonymous  staflF  governed  by  formula,  rather  than  de- 
voted, professional  men. 

Editors  seek  out  prominent  names,  and  men  with  such  names 
crave  even  more  prominence;  given  go-getting  editors  and  crav- 
ing notables,  it  is  inevitable  in  our  specialized  age  that  reliance 
on  the  expert  should  bring  about  a  large  expansion  of  ghost-writ- 
ing. The  chance  is  probably  fifty-fifty  that  the  book  of  a  prom- 
inent but  non-literary  man  is  actually  written  by  someone  else. 
Yet  perhaps  the  ghost-writer  is  among  the  honest  literary  men; 
in  him  alienation  from  work  reaches  the  final  point  of  complete 
lack  of  pubhc  responsibility. 

Although  the  large  universities  are  still  relatively  free  places 
in  which  to  work,  the  trends  that  limit  independence  of  intellect 
are  not  absent  there.  The  professor  is,  after  all,  an  employee, 
subject  to  what  this  fact  involves,  and  institutional  factors  select 
men  and  have  some  influence  upon  how,  when,  and  upon  what 
they  will  work.  Yet  the  deepest  problem  of  freedom  for  teachers 
is  not  the  occasional  ousting  of  a  professor,  but  a  vague  general 
fear— sometimes  called  'discretion'  and  'good  judgment'— which 
leads  to  self-intimidation  and  finally  becomes  so  habitual  that  the 
scholar  is  unaware  of  it.  The  real  restraints  are  not  so  much  ex- 
ternal prohibitions  as  manipulative  control  of  the  insurgent  by 
the  agreements  of  academic  gentlemen.  Such  control  is,  of  course, 


152  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

furthered  by  Hatch  Acts,  by  political  and  business  attacks  upon 
professors,  by  the  restraints  nece^arily  involved  in  Army  pro- 
grams for  colleges,  and  by  the  setting  up  of  committees  by  trade 
associations,  which  attempt  to  standardize  the  content  and  eflFects 
of  teaching  in  given  disciplines.  Research  in  social  science  is  in- 
creasingly dependent  upon  funds  from  foundations,  which  are 
notably  averse  to  scholars  who  develop  unpopular,  'unconstruc- 
tive,'  theses. 

The  United  States'  growing  international  entanglements  have 
still  other,  subtle  effects  upon  American  intellectuals:  for  the 
young  man  who  teaches  and  writes  on  Latin  America,  Asia,  or 
Europe,  and  who  does  not  deviate  from  acceptable  facts  and 
policies,  these  entanglements  lead  to  a  kind  of  voluntary  cen- 
sorship. He  hopes  for  opportunities  of  research,  travel,  and 
foundation  subsidies.  Tacitly,  by  his  silence,  or  explicitly  in  his 
work,  the  academic  intellectual  often  sanctions  illusions  that  up- 
hold authority,  rather  than  speak  out  against  them.  In  his  teach- 
ing, he  may  censor  himself  by  carefully  selecting  safe  problems 
in  the  name  of  pure  science,  or  by  selling  such  prestige  as  his 
scholarship  may  have  for  ends  other  than  his  own. 

More  and  more  people,  and  among  them  the  intellectuals,  are 
becoming  dependent  salaried  workers  who  spend  the  most  alert 
hours  of  their  lives  being  told  what  to  do.  In  our  time,  dominated 
by  the  need  for  swift  action,  the  individual,  including  the  free 
intellectual,  feels  dangerously  lost;  such  are  the  general  frustra- 
tions of  contemporary  life.  But  they  are  reflected  very  acutely, 
in  direct  and  many  indirect  ways,  into  the  world  of  the  intellec- 
tual. For  he  lives  by  communication,  and  the  means  of  effective 
communication  are  being  expropriated  from  the  intellectual 
worker. 

Knowledge  that  is  not  communicated  has  a  way  of  turning 
the  mind  sour,  of  being  obscured,  and  finally  of  being  forgotten. 
For  the  sake  of  the  integrity  of  the  discoverer,  his  discovery  must 
be  effectively  communicated.  Such  communication  is  also  a  neces- 
sary element  in  the  very  search  for  clear  understanding,  includ- 
ing the  understanding  of  one's  self.  Only  through  social  confirma- 
tion by  others  whom  he  believes  adequately  equipped  can  a  man 
earn  the  right  of  feeling  secure  in  his  knowledge.  The  basis  of 


BRAINS,  INC.  153 

integrity  can  be  gained  or  renewed  only  by  activity,  including 
communication,  in  which  there  is  a  minimum  of  repression.  When 
a  man  sells  the  lies  of  others  he  is  also  selling  himself.  To  sell 
himself  is  to  turn  himself  into  a  commodity,  A  commodity  does 
not  control  the  market;  its  nominal  worth  is  determined  by  what 
the  market  will  offer. 

3.  The  Ideological  Demand 

The  market,  though  it  is  undoubtedly  a  buyer's  market,  has  been 
paying  off  well.  The  demand  of  the  bureaucracies  has  been  not 
only  for  intellectual  personnel  to  run  the  new  technical,  editorial, 
and  communication  machinery,  but  for  the  creation  and  diffusion 
of  new  symbolic  fortifications  for  the  new  and  largely  private 
powers  these  bureaucracies  represent.  In  our  time,  every  interest, 
hatred,  or  passion  is  likely  to  be  intellectually  organized,  no 
matter  how  low  the  level  of  that  organization  may  be.  There  is 
a  great  'increase  of  conscious  formulation,'  Lionel  Trilling  re- 
marks, and  an  'increase  of  a  certain  kind  of  consciousness  by 
formulation.'  Around  each  interest  a  system  is  made  up,  a  system 
founded  on  Science.  A  research  cartel  must  be  engaged  or,  if 
none  yet  exists,  created,  in  which  careful  researchers  must  turn 
out  elaborate  studies  and  accurately  timed  releases,  buttressing 
the  interest,  competing  with  other  hatreds,  turning  pieties  into 
theologies,  passions  into  ideologies.  In  all  these  attempts  to 
secure  attention  and  credulity,  in  all  this  justifying  and  denying, 
intellectuals  are  required.  The  great  demand  for  new  justifica- 
tions has  been  facilitated  by  four  interrelated  and  cumulative 
processes: 

I.  Traditional  sanctifications  have  in  the  course  of  modern 
times  been  broken  up;  no  longer  are  underlying  meanings  tacitly 
accepted.  With  the  new,  diverse,  and  enlarged  means  of  com- 
munication, traditional  symbols  have  been  uprooted  and  ex- 
posed to  competition.  In  this  breakup,  the  intellectual  has  played 
a  major  role;  and  as  urban  society  has  demanded  new  heroes 
and  meanings,  it  has  been  the  intellectual  who  has  found  them 
and  spread  them  to  mass  publics. 


154  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

II.  As  every  interest  has  come  to  have  its  ideological  apparatus, 
and  new  means  of  communication  have  become  available,  sym- 
bols of  justification  and  diversion  have  multiplied  and  competed 
with  one  another  for  the  attention  of  various  publics.  Continu- 
ously in  demand  as  new  devices  to  attract  attention  and  hold  it, 
symbols  become  banalized  shortly  after  their  release,  and  the 
turnover  of  appealing  symbols  must  be  speeded  up.  An  elaborate 
study  is  outdated  when  a  new  one  is  made  the  next  month.  Thus 
the  continual  demand  for  new  ideas— that  is,  acceptable  ideas, 
attractive  modes  of  statement  of  interests,  passions,  and  hatreds. 

ra.  The  very  size  of  the  private  powers  that  have  emerged 
has  made  it  necessary  to  work  out  new  justifications  for  their 
exercise.  Clearly  the  power  of  the  modern  corporation  is  not 
easily  justifiable  in  terms  of  the  simple  democratic  theory  of  sov- 
ereignty inherited  from  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries. 
Many  an  intellectual  earns  a  good  income  because  of  that  fact. 
The  whole  growth  of  ideological  work  is  based  on  the  need  for 
the  vested  interests  lodged  in  the  new  power  centers  to  be  soft- 
ened, whitened,  blurred,  misinterpreted  to  those  who  serve  the 
interests  of  the  bureaucracies  inside,  and  to  those  in  its  sphere 
outside.  Because  of  the  funded  wealth  and  centralized  power, 
opinions  must  be  funded  and  centralized  into  good  will,  which 
must  be  continually  managed  and  sustained.  The  men  at  the 
helm  of  the  managerial  apparatus  derive  their  self-esteem  from 
their  bureaucracies  and  hence  need  intellectuals  to  compose 
suitable  myths,  about  them  and  it.  In  their  relation  to  man- 
agers new  entrepreneurs  of  various  types  have  had  their  main 
chance;  among  these  are  many  former  intellectuals  who  have 
seen  and  taken  that  chance. 

In  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  power  was  decentral- 
ized and  anonymous;  it  did  not  require  a  systematic  ideological 
cement.  In  the  new  managed  society,  power  is  centralized  and 
only  anonymous  when  it  is  manipulative;  one  of  the  major  tasks 
of  its  managers  is  ideological.  Their  problem  is  not  easy;  their 
search  for  new  and  compelling  justifications  might  well  be 
frenzied. 


BRAINS,  INC.  155 

rv.  Along  with  the  break  up  of  traditional  sanctions,  the 
speed-up  in  the  competition  of  symbols,  and  the  rise  of  new  un- 
sanctified  powers,  from  the  recurrent  crises  of  war  and  slump 
which  have  beset  modem  society,  deep  fears  and  anxieties  have 
spread.  These  have  put  new  urgency  into  the  search  for  adequate 
explanations  for  everyone  directly  involved.  The  middle  classes, 
both  old  and  new,  seen  as  a  bulwark  of  the  new  powers,  are  filled 
with  anxieties  and  the  need  for  new  opinions  of  the  new  world 
in  which  they  find  themselves,  or  for  diversion  from  it.  It  has 
been  the  intellectual's  part  to  divert  these  intermediary  strata 
and  to  keep  them  oriented  in  an  appropriate  manner  despite  their 
anxieties. 

When  irresponsible  decisions  prevail  and  values  are  not  pro- 
portionately distributed,  universal  deception  must  be  practiced 
by  and  for  those  who  make  the  decisions  and  who  have  the  most 
of  what  values  there  are  to  have.  An  increasing  number  of  intel- 
lectually equipped  men  and  women  work  within  powerful  bu- 
reaucracies and  for  the  relatively  few  who  do  the  deciding.  If 
the  intellectual  is  not  directly  hired  by  such  an  organization,  he 
seeks  by  little  steps  and  in  self-deceptive  as  well  as  conscious 
ways,  to  have  his  published  opinions  conform  to  the  limits  set  by 
the  organizations  and  by  those  who  are  directly  hired.  In  either 
case,  the  intellectual  becomes  a  mouthpiece.  There  often  seems 
to  be  no  areas  left  between  'outright  rebellion  and  grovelling 
sycophancy.' 

Perhaps,  in  due  course,  intellectuals  have  at  all  times  been 
drawn  into  line  with  either  popular  mentality  or  ruling  class,  and 
away  from  the  urge  to  be  detached;  but  now  in  the  middle  of  the 
twentieth  century,  the  recoil  from  detachment  and  the  falling 
into  line  seem  more  organized,  more  solidly  rooted  in  the  cen- 
tralization of  power  and  its  rationalization  of  modern  society  as 
a  whole.  If,  as  never  before,  intellectuals  find  it  difficult  to  locate 
their  masters  in  the  impersonal  machineries  of  authority  in  which 
they  work,  this,  despite  the  anxieties  it  may  at  times  cause  them, 
makes  more  possible  the  postures  of  objectivity  and  integrity  they 
continue  to  fancy. 


156  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

4.  The  Rise  of  the  Technician 

The  social  developments  centered  upon  the  rise  of  bureauc- 
racies and  the  ideological  developments  centered  upon  the  con- 
tinual demands  for  new  justifications  have  coincided:  together 
they  increasingly  determine  the  social  position  and  ideological 
posture  of  the  intellectual. 

Busy  with  the  ideological  speed-up,  the  intellectual  has  readily 
taken  on  the  responsibilities  of  the  citizen.  In  many  cases,  having 
ceased  to  be  in  any  sense  a  free  intellectual,  he  has  joined  the  ex- 
panding world  of  those  who  live  off  ideas,  as  administrator,  idea- 
man,  and  good-will  technician.  In  class,  status,  and  self-image, 
he  has  become  more  solidly  middle  class,  a  man  at  a  desk,  mar- 
ried, with  children,  living  in  a  respectable  suburb,  his  career 
pivoting  on  the  selling  of  ideas,  his  life  a  tight  little  routine,  sub- 
stituting middle-brow  and  mass  culture  for  direct  experience  of 
his  life  and  his  world,  and,  above  all,  becoming  a  man  with  a 
job  in  a  society  where  money  is  supreme. 

In  such  an  atmosphere,  intellectual  activity  that  does  not  have 
relevance  to  established  money  and  power  is  not  likely  to  be 
highly  valued.  In  the  'capitalization  of  the  spirit,'  as  George 
Lukacs  has  remarked,  talent  and  ideology  become  commodities. 
The  writing  of  memoranda,  telling  others  what  to  do,  replaces 
the  writing  of  books,  telling  others  how  it  is.  Cultural  and  intel- 
lectual products  may  be  valued  as  ornaments  but  do  not  bring 
even  ornamental  value  to  their  producers.  The  new  pattern  sets 
the  anxious  standards  of  economic  value  and  social  honor,  mak- 
ing it  increasingly  difficult  for  such  a  man  to  escape  the  routine 
ideological  panic  of  the  managerial  demiurge. 

The  scope  and  energy  of  these  new  developments,  the  spread 
of  managed  communications,  and  the  clutch  of  bureaucracies 
have  changed  the  social  position  of  many  intellectuals  in  America. 
Unlike  some  European  countries,  especially  central  and  eastern 
Europe,  the  United  States  has  not  produced  a  sizable  stratum  of 
intellectuals,  or  even  professionals,  who  have  been  unemployed 
long  enough  or  under  such  conditions  as  to  cause  frustration 
among  them.  Unemployment  among  American  intellectuals  has 
been  experienced  as  a  cyclical  phenomenon,  not,  as  in  some 


BRAINS,  INC.  157 

parts  of  Europe,  as  a  seemingly  permanent  condition.  The  ad- 
ministrative expansion  of  the  Hberal  state  and  the  enormous 
growth  of  private-interest  and  communications  bureaucracies 
have  in  fact  multiphed  opportunities  for  careers.  It  cannot  be 
said  that  the  intellectuals  have  cause  for  economic  alarm,  as 
yet.  In  fact,  amazing  careers  have  become  legends  among  them. 
Having  little  or  none  of  that  resentment  and  hostility  that  arose 
in  many  European  intellectual  circles  between  the  wars,  Ameri- 
can intellectuals  have  not,  as  an  articulate  group,  become 
leaders  for  such  discontented  mass  strata  as  may  have  become 
politically  aware  of  their  discontent.  Perhaps  they  have  become 
disoriented  and  estranged,  from  time  to  time,  but  they  have  not 
felt  disinherited. 

The  ascendency  of  the  technician  over  the  intellectual  in 
America  is  becoming  more  and  more  apparent,  and  seems  to  be 
taking  place  without  many  jolts.  The  U.S.  novelist,  artist,  politi- 
cal writer  is  very  good  indeed  at  the  jobs  for  which  he  is  hired. 
'What  is  fatal  to  the  American  writer,'  Edmund  Wilson  has 
written,  'is  to  be  brilliant  at  disgraceful  or  second-rate  jobs  .  .  . 
with  the  kind  of  American  writer  who  has  had  no  education  to 
speak  of,  you  are  unable  to  talk  at  all  once  Hollywood  or  Luce 
has  got  him.'  No  longer,  in  Matthew  Josephson's  language,  'de- 
tached from  the  spirit  of  immediate  gain,'  no  longer  having  a 
'sense  of  being  disinterested,'  the  intellectual  is  becoming  a 
technician,  an  idea-man,  rather  than  one  who  resists  the  envi- 
ronment, preserves  the  individual  type,  and  defends  himself 
from  death-by-adaptation. 

The  intellectual  who  remains  free  may  continue  to  learn  more 
and  more  about  modern  society,  but  he  finds  the  centers  of 
political  initiative  less  and  less  accessible.  This  generates  a 
malady  that  is  particularly  acute  in  the  intellectual  who  be- 
lieved his  thinking  would  make  a  difference.  In  the  world  of 
today  the  more  his  knowledge  of  affairs  grows,  the  less  impact 
his  thinking  seems  to  have.  If  he  grows  more  frustrated  as  his 
knowledge  increases,  it  seems  that  knowledge  leads  to  power- 
lessness.  He  comes  to  feel  helpless  in  the  fundamental  sense 
that  he  cannot  control  what  he  is  able  to  foresee.  This  is  not 


158  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

only  true  of  his  own  attempts  to  act;  it  is  true  of  the  acts  of 
powerful  men  whom  he  observes. 

Such  frustration  arises,  of  course,  only  in  the  man  who  feels 
compelled  to  act.  The  'detached  spectator'  does  not  feel  his 
helplessness  because  he  never  tries  to  surmount  it.  But  the  po- 
litical man  is  always  aware  that  while  events  are  not  in  his 
hands  he  must  bear  their  consequences.  He  finds  it  increasingly 
diflBcult  even  to  express  himself.  If  he  states  public  issues  as  he 
sees  them,  he  cannot  take  seriously  the  slogans  and  confusions 
used  by  parties  with  a  chance  to  win  power.  He  therefore  feels 
politically  irrelevant.  Yet  if  he  approaches  public  issues  realis- 
tically,' that  is,  in  terms  of  the  major  parties,  he  inevitably  so 
compromises  their  initial  statement  that  he  is  not  able  to  sustain 
any  enthusiasm  for  political  action  and  thought. 

The  political  failure  of  nerve  thus  has  a  personal  counterpart 
in  the  development  of  a  tragic  sense  of  life,  which  may  be  ex- 
perienced as  a  personal  discovery  and  a  personal  burden,  but 
is  also  a  reflection  of  objective  circumstances.  It  arises  from  the 
fact  that  at  the  fountainheads  of  public  decision  there  are  pow- 
erful men  who  do  not  themselves  suffer  the  violent  results  of 
their  own  decisions.  In  a  world  of  big  organizations  the  lines 
between  powerful  decisions  and  grass-roots  democratic  controls 
become  blurred  and  tenuous,  and  seemingly  irresponsible  ac- 
tions by  individuals  at  the  top  are  encouraged.  The  need  for 
action  prompts  them  to  take  decisions  into  their  own  hands, 
while  the  fact  that  they  act  as  parts  of  large  corporations  or 
other  organizations  blurs  the  identification  of  personal  responsi- 
bility. Their  public  views  and  political  actions  are,  in  this  objec- 
tive meaning  of  the  word,  irresponsible:  the  social  corollary  of 
their  irresponsibility  is  the  fact  that  others  are  dependent  upon 
them  and  must  suffer  the  consequence  of  their  ignorance  and 
mistakes,  their  self-deceptions  and  biased  motives.  The  sense  of 
tragedy  in  the  intellectual  who  watches  this  scene  is  a  personal 
reaction  to  the  politics  and  economics  of  collective  irresponsi- 
bility. 

The  shaping  of  the  society  he  lives  in  and  the  manner  in 
which  he  lives  in  it  are  increasingly  political.  That  shaping  has 
come  to  include  the  realms  of  intellect  and  of  personal  morality, 
which  are  now  also  subject  to  organization.  Because  of  the  ex- 


BRAINS,  INC.  159 

panded  reach  of  politics,  it  is  his  own  personal  style  of  life  and 
reflections  he  is  thinking  about  when  he  thinks  about  politics. 

The  independent  artist  and  intellectual  are  among  the  few 
remaining  personalities  presumably  equipped  to  resist  and  to 
fight  the  stereotyping  and  consequent  death  of  genuinely  lively 
things.  Fresh  perception  now  involves  the  capacity  to  unmask 
and  smash  the  stereotypes  of  vision  and  intellect  with  which 
modern  communications  swamp  us.  The  worlds  of  mass-art  and 
mass-thought  are  increasingly  geared  to  the  demands  of  power. 
That  is  why  it  is  in  politics  that  some  intellectuals  feel  the  need 
for  solidarity  and  for  a  fulcrum.  If  the  thinker  does  not  relate 
himself  to  the  value  of  truth  in  political  struggle,  he  cannot  re- 
sponsibly cope  with  the  whole  of  live  experience. 

As  the  channels  of  communication  become  more  and  more 
monopolized,  and  party  machines  and  economic  pressures, 
based  on  vested  shams,  continue  to  monopolize  the  chances  of 
effective  political  organization,  the  opportunities  to  act  and  to 
communicate  politically  are  minimized.  The  political  intellec- 
tual is,  increasingly,  an  employee  living  off  the  communication 
machineries  which  are  based  on  the  very  opposite  of  what  he 
would  like  to  stand  for. 

Just  as  the  bright  young  technicians  and  editors  cannot  face 
politics  except  as  news  and  entertainment,  so  the  remaining 
free  intellectuals  increasingly  withdraw;  the  simple  fact  is  that 
they  lack  the  will.  The  external  and  internal  forces  that  move 
them  away  from  politics  are  too  strong;  they  are  pulled  into  the 
technical  machinery,  the  explicit  rationalization  of  intellect,  or 
they  go  the  way  of  personal  lament. 

Today  there  are  many  forms  of  escape  for  the  free  intellec- 
tuals from  the  essential  facts  of  defeat  and  powerlessness, 
among  them  the  cult  of  alienation  and  the  fetish  of  objectivity. 
Both  hide  the  fact  of  powerlessness  and  at  the  same  time  at- 
tempt to  make  that  fact  more  palatable. 

'Alienation,'  as  used  in  middle-brow  circles,  is  not  the  old  de- 
tachment of  the  intellectual  from  the  popular  tone  of  life  and  its 
structure  of  domination;  it  does  not  mean  estrangement  from 
the  ruling  powers;  nor  is  it  a  phase  necessary  to  the  pursuit  of 
truth.  It  is  a  lament  and  a  form  of  collapse  into  self-indulgence. 


160  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

It  is  a  personal  excuse  for  lack  of  political  will.  It  is  a  fashion- 
able way  of  being  overwhelmed.  In  function,  it  is  the  literary 
counterpart  to  the  cult  of  objectivity  in  the  social  sciences. 

Objectivity  or  Scientism  is  often  an  academic  cult  of  the  nar- 
rowed attention,  the  pose  of  the  technician,  or  the  aspiring  tech- 
nician, who  assumes  as  given  the  big  framework  and  the  politi- 
cal meaning  of  his  operation  within  it.  Often  an  unimaginative 
use  of  already  plotted  routines  of  life  and  work,  'objectivity' 
may  satisfy  those  who  are  not  interested  in  politics;  but  it  is  a 
specialized  form  of  retreat  rather  than  the  intellectual  orienta- 
tion of  a  political  man. 

Both  alienation  and  objectivity  fall  in  line  with  the  victory  of 
the  technician  over  the  intellectual.  They  are  fit  moods  and  ideol- 
ogies for  intellectuals  caught  up  in  and  overwhelmed  by  the 
managerial  demiurge  in  an  age  of  organized  irresponsibility;  sig- 
nals that  'the  job,'  as  sanction  and  as  censorship,  has  come  to 
embrace  the  intellectual;  and  that  the  political  psychology  of 
the  scared  employee  has  become  relevant  to  understanding  his 
work.  Simply  to  understand,  or  to  lament  alienation— these  are 
the  ideals  of  the  technician  who  is  powerless  and  estranged  but 
not  disinherited.  These  are  the  ideals  of  men  who  have  the 
capacity  to  know  the  truth  but  not  the  chance,  the  skill,  or  the 
fortitude,  as  the  case  may  be,  to  communicate  it  with  political 
efiFectiveness. 

The  defeat  of  the  free  intellectuals  and  the  rationalization  of 
the  free  intellect  have  been  at  the  hands  of  an  enemy  who 
cannot  be  clearly  defined.  Even  given  the  power,  the  free  intel- 
lectuals could  not  easily  find  the  way  to  work  their  will  upon 
their  situation,  nor  could  they  succeed  in  destroying  its  effect 
upon  what  they  are,  what  they  do,  and  what  they  want  to  be- 
come. They  find  it  harder  to  locate  their  external  enemies  than 
to  grapple  with  their  internal  conditions.  Their  seemingly  im- 
personal defeat  has  spun  a  personally  tragic  plot  and  they  are 
betrayed  by  what  is  false  within  them. 


8 


The  Great  Salesroom 


In  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  selling  was  one  activity 
among  many,  limited  in  scope,  technique,  and  manner.  In  the 
new  society,  selling  is  a  pervasive  activity,  unlimited  in  scope 
and  ruthless  in  its  choice  of  technique  and  manner. 

The  salesman's  world  has  now  become  everybody's  world, 
and,  in  some  part,  everybody  has  become  a  salesman.  The  en- 
larged market  has  become  at  once  more  impersonal  and  more 
intimate.  What  is  there  that  does  not  pass  through  the  market? 
Science  and  love,  virtue  and  conscience,  friendliness,  carefully 
nurtured  skills  and  animosities?  This  is  a  time  of  venality.  The 
market  now  reaches  into  every  institution  and  every  relation. 
The  bargaining  manner,  the  huckstering  animus,  the  memorized 
theology  of  pep,  the  commercialized  evaluation  of  personal 
traits— they  are  all  around  us;  in  public  and  in  private  there  is 
the  tang  and  feel  of  salesmanship. 

1.  Types  of  Salesmen 

The  American  Salesman  has  gone  through  several  major 
phases,  each  of  which  corresponds  to  a  phase  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  business  system.  This  system  is  a  vast  and  intricate 
network  of  institutions,  each  strand  of  which  is  a  salesman  of  one 
sort  or  another.  Any  change  in  this  system  and  of  its  relations  to 
society  as  a  whole  will  be  reflected  in  the  development  of  types 
of  salesmen  and  of  the  kind  of  salesmanship  that  prevails. 

When  demand  was  generally  greater  than  production,  selling 

161 


162  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

occurred  largely  in  a  seller's  market,  and  was  in  the  main  a  more 
or  less  effortless  matter  of  being  in  a  certain  place  at  a  certain 
time  in  order  to  take  an  order.  When  demands  balanced  supplies 
the  salesman  as  a  means  of  distribution  merely  provided  infor- 
mation. But  when  the  pressure  from  the  producer  to  sell  became 
much  greater  than  the  capacity  of  the  consumer  to  buy,  the  role 
of  the  salesman  shifted  into  high  gear.  In  the  twentieth  century, 
as  surpluses  piled  up,  the  need  has  been  for  distribution  to 
national  markets;  and  with  the  spread  of  national  advertising,  co- 
extensive sales  organizations  have  been  needed  to  cash  in  on  its 
effects. 

When  business  firms  were  able  to  increase  their  output  in  an 
enlarging  market,  they  could  conveniently  underbid  one  another; 
but  in  a  contracted  or  closed  market,  they  prefer  not  to  compete 
in  terms  of  price.  It  may  be  that  lower  prices,  as  many  econo- 
mists hold,  are  'more  effective  .  .  .  than  the  .  .  .  methods  of 
"aggressive"— and  cost-increasing— salesmanship.'  But  in  its  way 
high-pressure  selling  is  a  substitute  stimulator  of  demand,  not  by 
lowering  prices  but  by  creating  new  wants  and  more  urgent  de- 
sires. 'The  business,'  wrote  Veblen,  'reduces  itself  to  a  traffic  in 
salesmanship,  running  wholly  on  the  comparative  merit  of  .  .  . 
the  rival  salesmen.'  Salesmanship  in  the  United  States  has  been 
made  into  a  virtually  autonomous  force  dependent  only  upon 
will,  which  keeps  the  economy  in  high-gear  operation. 

In  the  older  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur  there  were  store- 
keepers but  few  salesmen.  After  the  Revolutionary  War,  there 
began  to  be  traveling  peddlers,  whose  markets  were  thin  but 
widespread.  By  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  whole- 
saler—then the  dominant  type  of  entrepreneur— began  to  hire 
drummers  or  greeters,  whose  job  it  was  to  meet  retailers  and 
jobbers  in  hotels  or  saloons  in  the  market  centers  of  the  city. 
Later,  these  men  began  to  travel  to  the  local  markets.  Then,  as 
manufacturers  replaced  wholesalers  as  dominant  powers  in  the 
world  of  business,  their  traveling  agents  joined  the  wholesalers. 

Goods  produced  in  the  factory  are  transported  to  urban  centers 
of  consumption;  there  they  pile  up,  and  are  unpiled  into  the 
market  radius  of  the  city.  Without  mass  production,  commodities 
cannot  be  accumulated  to  fill  great  stores.  Without  big  cities 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  163 

there  are  no  markets  large  enough  and  concentrated  enough  to 
support  such  stores.  Without  a  transportation  net,  the  goods 
produced  cannot  be  picked  up  at  scattered  points  and  placed  in 
the  middle  of  the  urban  mass.  Each  of  these  is  a  center  of  the 
modern  web-work  of  business  and  society. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  same  conditions  also  make  possible  the 
smaller  specialty  shop— shops  that  sell  only  gloves  or  ties.  In  the 
history  of  modern  trade,  N.  S.  B.  Gras  observes,  there  seems  to 
be  a  sort  of  oscillation  between  specialization  and  integration. 
An  enterprise  may  specialize  in  terms  of  the  lines  of  commodi- 
ties that  it  handles,  or  in  terms  of  the  junctures  of  the  economic 
circuit  that  it  serves.  It  may  handle  many  lines  of  merchandise 
or  few;  it  may  retail,  wholesale,  and  manufacture,  or  it  may  per- 
form only  one  of  these  functions.  The  oscillation  of  modern  enter- 
prise between  specialization  and  integration  involves  lines  of 
merchandise  as  well  as  economic  functions.  With  some  simplifica- 
tion, the  historical  rhythm  of  enterprise,  as  it  involves  the  Ameri- 
can store,  may  be  outlined  in  this  way:  (1)  In  the  eighteenth 
century,  the  market  was  small-scale  and  the  ways  of  reaching  it 
were  primitive.  There  was  little  specialization  and  the  small  gen- 
eral store  prevailed.  (2)  In  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, specialization  proceeded;  by  the  mid  years  of  the  century 
the  cities  were  full  of  specialty  shops,  each  focusing  on  a  narrow 
area  of  the  enlarging  market.  They  were  mainly  retail,  and  were 
advised,  in  the  business  lore  of  the  time,  to  stick  each  to  its  own 
economic  function.  (3)  For  the  last  hundred  years,  the  amalga- 
mating, integrating  tendency,  of  which  the  department  store  is  a 
prime  exemplar,  has  been  on  the  upswing. 

There  are  still  trading  posts  in  outlying  areas,  and  general  mer- 
chandise stores.  Single-line  or  specialty  shops  still  numerically 
dominate  U.S.  retailing.  But  the  department  store,  the  chain 
store,  the  mail  order  house— all  principally  types  of  this  century- 
are  most  in  tune  with  the  new  society. 

Dependent  as  the  economy  is  upon  replacement  markets  and 
rapid  turnover,  obsolescence  must  be  planned  into  the  commodi- 
ties produced,  speeded  up  by  the  technique  of  marketing.  The 
needs  of  salesmanship  are  thus  geared  even  to  the  design  of 


164  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

commodities;  the  chief  concern  of  the  industrial  designers,  the 
great  packagers,  is  the  appearance  of  commodities,  changing 
colors,  shapes,  and  names.  The  whole  of  fashion,  not  only  in 
clothing,  automobiles,  and  furniture,  but  in  virtually  all  com- 
modities, is  deliberately  managed  to  the  end  of  greater  sales 
volume.  Fashion  has  become  a  rational  attempt  to  exploit  the 
status  market  for  a  greater  turnover  of  goods.  Behind  the  $126.3 
billion  worth  of  goods  U.S.  consumers  bought  in  1948  there  lie 
not  only  the  economic  facts  of  need  and  exchange,  but  the  social 
fact  that  U.S.  society  has  in  crucial  aspects  become  a  continuous 
fashion  show. 

The  shift  in  economic  emphasis  from  production  to  distribution 
has  meant  both  the  persistence  of  the  old  urban  middle  class, 
which  is  now  located  in  distribution,  and  the  expansion  of  con- 
siderable portions  of  the  new  middle  class.  Of  the  old  middle 
class  19  per  cent  are  directly  involved  in  retail  and  wholesale 
selling.  They  are  not  captains  of  industry,  but  corporals  of  re- 
tailing. In  the  meantime,  the  era  of  big  retailing  has  brought 
forth  over  3  million  white-collar  people  who  are  now  directly 
involved  in  selling;  in  1940,  they  were  6  per  cent  of  the  labor 
force,  14  per  cent  of  the  total  middle  class,  25  per  cent  of  all 
white-collar  people. 

In  terms  of  skills  involved,  sales  personnel  range  from  the  sales- 
men who  create  and  satisfy  new  desires,  through  salespeople  who 
do  not  create  desires  or  customers  but  wait  for  them,  to  the  order- 
fillers  who  merely  receive  payment,  make  change,  and  wrap  up 
what  is  bought.  Some  salesmen  must  know  the  technical  details 
of  complex  commodities  and  their  maintenance;  others  need 
know  nothing  about  the  simple  commodities  they  sell. 

In  terms  of  social  level,  at  the  top  of  the  sales  hierarchy  are  the 
Prima  Donna  Vice-Presidents  of  corporations,  who  boast  that 
they  are  merely  salesmen,  and  at  the  bottom,  the  five-and-ten- 
cent-store  girls  who  work  for  half  days  several  months  before 
they  leave  the  job  market  for  marriage.  Near  the  top  of  the  hier- 
archy are  the  Distribution  Executives  who  design,  organize,  and 
direct  the  selling  techniques  of  salesforces.  Close  to  them  are  the 
absentee  salesmen  who  create  the  slogans  and  images  that  spur 
sales  from  a  distance  by  mass  media. 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  165 

In  terms  of  where  the  sale  is  made,  salespeople  may  be  classi- 
fied as  stationary,  mobile,  or  absentee.  Stationary  salespeople— 
now  about  60  per  cent  of  the  white-collar  people  involved  in 
selling— sell  in  stores,  behind  the  counters.  Mobile  salesmen— now 
about  38  per  cent— make  the  rounds  to  the  houses  and  offices  of 
the  customers.  They  range  from  peddlers  walking  from  door-to- 
door,  to  'commercial  travelers'  who  fly  to  their  formal  appoint- 
ments expertly  made  weeks  in  advance.  Absentee  salesmen— ad 
men,  now  2  per  cent  of  all  salespeople— manage  the  machineries 
of  promotion  and  advertising  and  are  not  personally  present  at 
the  point  of  the  sale,  but  act  as  all-pervasive  adjuncts  to  those 
who  are. 

The  national  market  has  become  an  object  upon  which  many 
white-collar  skills  focus:  the  professional  market  researcher  ex- 
amines it  intensively  and  extensively;  the  personnel  man  selects 
and  trains  salesmen  of  a  thousand  different  types  for  its  exploita- 
tion; the  manager  studies  the  fine  art  of  prompting  men  to  'go 
get  'em/  As  competition  for  restricted  markets  builds  up,  and 
buyers'  markets  become  more  frequent,  the  pressure  mounts  in 
the  salesman's  immediate  domain.  Psychologists  bend  their  minds 
to  improving  the  technique  of  persuading  people  to  commercial 
decisions.  Before  high-pressure  salesmanship,  emphasis  was  upon 
the  salesmen's  knowledge  of  the  product,  a  sales  knowledge 
grounded  in  apprenticeship;  after  it,  the  focus  is  upon  hypnotiz- 
ing the  prospect,  an  art  provided  by  psychology. 

The  salesmen  link  up  one  unit  of  business  society  with  another; 
salesmanship  is  coextensive  with  the  cash  nexus  of  the  modem 
world.  It  is  not  only  a  marketing  device,  it  is  a  pervasive  ap- 
paratus of  persuasion  that  sets  a  people's  style  of  life.  For  all 
types  of  marketing-entrepreneurs  and  white-collar  salespeople, 
in  and  out  of  stores,  on  the  roads  and  in  the  air,  are  only  the  con- 
centration points  in  the  cadre  of  salesmanship.  So  deeply  have 
they  infiltrated,  so  potent  is  their  influence,  that  they  may  be 
seen  as  a  sort  of  oflBcial  personnel  of  an  all-pervasive  atmosphere. 
That  is  why  we  cannot  understand  salesmanship  by  studying 
only  salesmen.  The  American  premium,  we  learn  in  Babbitt,  is 
not  upon  'selling  anything  in  particular  for  or  to  anybody  in  par- 
ticular, but  pure  selling.'  Now,  salesmanship  has  become  an 
abstracted  value,  a  science,  an  ideology  and  a  style  of  life  for  a 


166  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

society  that  has  turned  itself  into  a  fabulous  salesroom  and  be- 
become  the  biggest  bazaar  in  the  world. 


2.  The  Biggest  Bazaar  in  the  World  * 

Fifty  years  ago,  the  Big  Bazaar  moved  uptown  to  become  one 
of  the  hubs  of  the  megalopolis.  When  it  moved,  thirty-two  build- 
ings, housing  smaller  and  less  independent  establishments,  had 
to  be  knocked  down.  Everybody  said  it  was  the  biggest  and  the 
best  bazaar  in  the  world. 

Its  twenty-three  acres  of  floor,  each  a  square  block,  were  built 
for  ups  and  downs  as  well  as  for  cross-floor  movement.  The  esca- 
lators alone  could  lift  and  sink  40,000  people  every  hour.  And 
all  day  long,  folded  money  and  slips  of  paper  were  shot  through 
eighteen  miles  of  brass  tubing  to  end  in  the  cartellized  brain,  the 
office  center  of  the  big  bazaar. 

Then,  alongside  the  first  square  block,  they  built  again  and 
still  again,  the  additions  rearing  up  to  dwarf  the  old  beginning. 
Now  there  are  almost  fifty  acres  of  floor,  and  off  the  island  of 
Manhattan,  there  are  thirty  more  acres  where  men  and  commodi- 
ties wait  to  move  in  on  the  biggest  bazaar  in  the  world. 

Now  there  are  58  escalators,  29  elevators,  and  105  conveyer 
belts;  26  freight  lifts  whisk  loaded  trucks  from  floor  to  floor;  75 
miles  of  tubing  carry  the  records  of  who  bought  it,  who  sold  it, 
what  it  was,  how  much  was  paid,  when  did  all  this  happen. 

Still  it  cannot  be  contained:  it  reaches  out  to  Ohio  and  San 
Francisco,  to  Alabama,  Chicago,  Rochester;  it  is  a  chain  of  chains 
of  departments.  And  deep  in  its  heart,  they  have  a  professional 
staff  and  ten  clerks  who  sit  every  day  figuring  out  the  portentous 
question:  Where  will  the  next  one  be  planted? 

One  hundred  and  eighty  incoming  telephones  keep  one  hun- 
dred operators  politely  tired.  If  you  can't  come,  phone;  we  also 
deliver.  Out  from  the  bazaar  for  fifty  miles,  our  four  hundred 
and  ten  vans  carry  the  bazaar  into  your  very  home,  leaving  a 
little  part  of  itself,  making  it  a  part  of  you. 

'  The  typological  statement  in  sections  2  and  3,  which  is  modeled 
on  large  middle-class  department  stores  in  big  cities,  draws  heavily 
upon  Ralph  M.  Hower's  excellent  History  of  Macy's  of  New  York, 
1859-1919  (Cambridge:  Harvard  University  Press,  1943). 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  167 

Do  you  think  the  family  is  important  to  society?  But  the  Big 
Bazaar  feeds,  clothes,  amuses;  it  replaces  famihes,  in  every  re- 
spect but  the  single  one  of  biological  reproduction.  From  womb 
to  grave,  it  watches  over  you,  supplying  the  necessities  and  creat- 
ing the  unmet  need.  Back  in  the  'nineties,  the  Bazaar  had  begun 
to  speak  as  the  Universal  Provider:  'Follow  the  crowd  and  it  will 
always  take/you  to/  (The  Big  Bazaar).  .  .  /The  All  Around 
Store.  .  .  /Ride  our  bicycles,/  read  our  books,  cook  in  our  sauce- 
pans,/ dine  oflF  our  china,  wear  our  silks,/  get  under  our  blankets, 
smoke  our  cigars,/  drink  our  wines  .  .  .  /  and  life  will  Cost 
You  Less  and  Yield  You  More/Than  You  Dreamed  Possible.' 

Do  you  think  factories  are  something  to  know  about?  But  the 
Bazaar  is  a  factory:  it  has  taken  unto  itself  the  several  phases  of 
the  economic  circuit,  and  now  contains  them  all.  And  it  is  also 
a  factory  of  smiles  and  visions,  of  faces  and  dreams  of  life,  sur- 
rounding people  with  the  commodities  for  which  they  live,  hold- 
ing out  to  them  the  goals  for  which  they  struggle.  What  factory 
is  geared  so  deep  and  direct  with  what  people  want  and  what 
they  are  becoming?  Measured  by  space  or  measured  by  money, 
it  is  the  greatest  emporium  in  the  world:  it  is  a  world— dedicated 
to  commodities,  run  by  committees  and  paced  by  floor-walkers. 

It  is  hard  to  say  who  owns  the  Bazaar.  It  began  when  a  petty 
capitalist  left  whaling  ships  for  retail  trade.  Then  it  became  a 
family  business;  some  partners  appeared,  and  they  took  over; 
now  it  is  a  corporation,  and  nobody  owns  more  than  10  per  cent. 
From  a  single  proprietor  to  what,  in  the  curious  lingo  of  finance, 
is  called  the  public.  The  eldest  son  of  an  eldest  son  has  a  lot  of 
say-so  about  its  workings,  but  if  he  went  away,  nobody  doubts 
that  it  would  go  on:  it  is  self-creative  and  self-perpetuating  and 
nobody  owns  it. 

But  who  runs  it?  Someone  has  to  run  it.  At  first  one  person  did 
—knew  all  about  it  and  owned  it  and  ran  it.  Once  a  week  this 
merchant  stood  in  the  middle  of  his  store  and  read  impressively 
and  out  loud  the  name  of  the  clerk  who  had  sold  the  most  during 
the  past  week.  From  where  he  stood,  he  could  see  all  the  opera- 
tions in  each  department  of  his  store.  But  now  there  is  no  mer- 
chant and  no  place  for  such  a  merchant  to  stand,  now  a  hundred 


168  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

people  do  what  that  man  did.  What  one  of  them  does  is  often 
secret  to  the  others.  It  has  become  so  impersonal  at  the  top  and 
bottom  that  a  major  problem  is  how  to  make  it  personal  again, 
and  still  smooth-running  and  continuous. 

There  are  managers  of  this  and  managers  of  that,  and  there 
are  managers  of  managers,  but  when  any  one  of  them  dies  or  dis- 
appears, it  doesn't  make  any  difference.  The  store  goes  on.  It 
was  created  by  people  who  did  not  know  what  they  were  creat- 
ing; and  now  it  creates  people,  who  in  turn  do  not  know  what 
they  are  creating.  Every  hour  of  the  day  it  creates  and  destroys 
and  re-creates  itself,  nobody  knowing  about  it  all  but  somebody 
knowing  about  every  single  part  of  it. 

So  the  chaos  you  see  is  only  apparent:  nothing  haphazard 
happens  here.  Things  are  under  control;  everything  is  accounted 
for;  it  is  all  in  the  files,  and  the  committees  know  about  the  files, 
and  other  committees  know  about  those  committees. 

In  the  cathedral,  worship  is  organized;  this  is  the  cathedral  of 
commodities,  whispering  and  shouting  for  its  394,000  assorted 
gods  (not  including  colors  and  sizes).  In  organizing  the  congre- 
gation, the  Big  Bazaar  has  been  training  it  for  faster  and  more 
eflBcient  worship.  Its  most  effective  prayers  have  been  formed  in 
the  ritual  of  the  Great  Repetition,  a  curious  blending  of  piety 
and  the  barking  of  the  circus. 

The  gods  men  worship  determine  how  they  live.  Gods  have 
always  changed,  but  never  before  has  their  change  been  so  well 
or  so  widely  organized;  never  before  has  their  worship  been  so 
universal  and  so  devout.  In  organizing  the  fetishism  of  com- 
modities, the  Big  Bazaar  has  made  gods  out  of  flux  itself.  Fashion 
used  to  be  something  for  uptown  aristocrats,  and  had  mainly  to 
do  with  deities  of  dress.  But  the  Big  Bazaar  has  democratized 
the  idea  of  fashion  to  all  orders  of  commodities  and  for  all  classes 
of  worshipers.  Fashion  means  faster  turnover,  because  if  you 
worship  the  new,  you  will  be  ashamed  of  the  old.  In  its  benevo- 
lence, the  Big  Bazaar  has  built  the  rhythmic  worship  of  fashion 
into  the  habits  and  looks  and  feeUngs  of  the  urban  mass:  it  has 
organized  the  imagination  itself.  In  dressing  people  up  and 
changing  the  scenery  of  their  lives,  on  the  street  and  in  the  bed- 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  169 

room,  it  has  cultivated  a  great  faith  in  the  Rehgion  of  Appear- 
ance. 

Before  the  age  of  the  Big  Bazaar,  these  gods  had  no  large- 
scale  evangelist.  The  old  fair  and  the  little  shop  sat  passive  and 
still.  Before  there  were  quiet  little  notices,  like  those  for  birth 
or  death,  in  close  lines,  somberly  announcing  what  was  available. 
But  the  Big  Bazaar  is  the  continuous  evangelist  for  394,000  com- 
modities; every  day  it  tempts  137,000  women;  while  11,000  em- 
ployees fill  their  ears  with  incantations,  their  innermost  eyes  with 
visions. 

3.  Buyers  and  Floorwalkers 

The  department  store  is  not  a  continuation  of  the  old  general 
store,  but  a  synthesis  of  general  store  and  specialty  shop.  Fairs 
in  the  medieval  West  and  bazaars  in  the  Orient  were  many  little 
shops  under  one  roof,  each  under  its  own  management  and  the 
total  but  a  passing  combination.  The  old  general  store  was  small 
and  not  organized  by  departments;  peddlers  grew  up  to  become 
Woolworths,  not  Macy's.  None  of  these  quasi-prototypes  pro- 
vided the  'liberal  services'  that  the  department  store  often  pro- 
vides: free  delivery,  charge  account,  the  return  privilege,  free 
rest  room,  information  service. 

The  modem  department  store  is  a  congeries  of  little  hierarch- 
ies, which  in  turn  sum  up  to  the  store  as  a  whole.  It  is  a  curious 
blend  of  decentralized  organs  and  intricate  centralizing  nerves. 
Departments  are  organized  along  commodity  lines,  each  with  its 
own  managers,  all  knit  firmly  together  by  a  financial  and  person- 
nel network.  By  watching  the  running  balance  of  outgo  and 
yield,  the  accounting  system  keeps  alert  to  the  work  of  each 
department.  The  big  store  is  departmentalized  by  commodities 
and  centralized  by  accounting. 

In  the  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  owners  or 
their  top  managers  worked  through  a  superintendent,  who  was 
in  charge  of  the  placement  of  employees,  the  movement  of  goods, 
and  general  maintenance.  Below  him  and  his  office's  circle,  mana- 
gerial responsibility  ran  along  merchandise  lines,  each  depart- 
ment keeping  its  own  accounts. 


170  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

At  the  head  of  each  department  was  a  buyer,  who  was  re- 
sponsible for  what  was  for  sale  at  any  given  time,  the  manner  in 
which  it  was  sold,  the  terms  and  the  turnover  of  goods,  and  the 
resultant  profits. 

Alongside  the  buyer,  who  handled  merchandise  and  money, 
was  the  floorwalker,  who  handled  customers  and  salesclerks.  His 
language  was  the  language  of  service,  his  aim  the  union  for  profit 
of  customer  and  clerk.  The  floorwalker-manager,  now  often 
known  as  a  service  or  section  manager,  watched  the  clerks  and 
the  cash  girls,  served  as  timekeeper,  checked  the  employees  in 
and  out  of  the  store,  enforced  a  disciplined  politeness,  and,  as 
an  expert  at  softening  complaints,  approved  or  rejected  refunds 
and  exchanges. 

Relations  between  buyers  and  floorwalkers  were  not  always 
cordial.  It  was  the  floorwalker's  consistent  'care  not  to  displease 
the  all-powerful  and  often  crotchety  buyers.'  Formally,  the  top 
superintendent  was  supposed  to  hire  and  fire  salespeople,  the 
floorwalker  'to  keep  them  in  order.'  But  actually,  'the  buyer's 
voice  was  usually  the  deciding  one.'  Since  he  was  responsible  for 
the  turnover  of  goods  at  a  profit,  he  directed  the  selling  opera- 
tions of  his  department.  The  buyer  was  the  point  of  intersection 
between  the  rules  of  the  bureaucracy  and  the  chance  calculation 
of  the  unrationalized  market. 

By  1900,  with  many  departments  in  the  store,  the  firm  began 
to  bring  in  a  new  type  of  personnel,  men  and  women  trained  in 
colleges  rather  than  in  little  retail  shops;  bookkeeping  became 
a  tool  for  the  systematic  analysis  of  operations,  rather  than  mere 
historical  record.  Committees  began  to  co-ordinate,  operations 
were  standardized,  all  under  a  control  from  above.  In  this  cen- 
tralization, the  authority  of  the  buyer,  although  not  his  responsi- 
bility, has  been  minimized.  As  a  result,  the  buyer  often  becomes 
a  pocket  of  anxiety,  often  being  blamed  'if  the  departmental 
operations  were  considered  unsatisfactory,  even  if  the  trouble 
was  actually  beyond  his  control.' 

By  World  War  I,  the  department  store  was  almost  entirely  run 
by  central  plan,  the  execution  of  which  was  watched  and  checked 
by  central  agents.  Buyers  were  managed  through  a  social  club, 
the  'Managers'  Association;  a  'Board  of  Operations'  and  an  'Ad- 
visory Council,'  containing  all  top  people,  further  completed  the 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  171 

bureaucratic  reorganization,  'so  that  it  would  function  continu- 
ously without  depending  upon  the  presence  of  any  one  person.' 
By  a  series  of  small  developments,  the  Controller's  OfBce  began 
to  allocate  expenses,  direct  and  indirect,  to  each  buyer  and  his 
department,  to  take  over  more  and  more  decisions.  The  buyer 
was  watched,  coached,  and  ordered  by  committees  and  boards; 
his  decisions  about  the  merchandise  were  expropriated.  No 
longer  the  lord  of  a  small  domain  in  feudahsm,  the  buyer  became 
a  higher-salaried  employee  in  a  bureaucracy. 

The  floorwalker,  too,  like  the  industrial  foreman,  began  to  lose 
many  of  his  functions,  in  particular  the  training  of  new  sales- 
people. By  1915  a  separate  training  organization,  which  taught 
the  rules  of  the  store  and  the  merchandise  to  be  handled,  was 
set  up.  No  longer  did  the  floorwalker  preside  over  small  weekly 
staff  meetings  in  each  department,  where  'matters  of  store  disci- 
pline, courtesy  to  customer,  and  related  topics'  were  discussed. 
In  1911,  the  Board  of  Operations,  analyzing  its  statistics,  'of- 
fered clerks  ten  cents  for  every  error  they  detected  in  credit  slips 
made  out  by  floorwalkers.  .  .' 

In  the  'nineties,  the  middle  management  of  buyers  and  floor- 
walkers and  other  minor  executives  often  seemed  to  be  'poorly 
educated  and  hardened  by  failure  and  adversity,'  and  according 
to  some  contemporary  observers,  even  'never  wholly  reliable, 
constantly  shifting  from  one  store  to  another  in  search  of  a  "real 
opportunity"  which  could  never  materialize  for  them,  they  often 
sought  consolation  in  the  bottle.  Indeed,  one  of  the  management's 
problems  in  this  period  was  the  buyer  or  floorwalker  who  went 
out  to  lunch  and  failed  to  return  or  came  back  too  drunk  to  be 
tolerated  on  the  selling  floor.  At  least  one  young  clerk  won  pro- 
motion through  his  ability  to  act  as  substitute  on  such  occasions,' 
thus  confirming  the  linkage  of  virtue  and  success. 

But  in  the  twentieth  century,  the  'scientific  selection  and  train- 
ing of  personnel'  replaced  haphazard  hiring  as  the  store  began 
systematically  'to  seek  college  graduates  as  material  for  the  or- 
ganization they  were  building';  and  to  expand  the  training  pro- 
gram for  these  employees,  so  as  to  draw  from  their  own  care- 
fully selected  ranks  people  for  higher  positions.  After  World 
War  I,  this  new  personnel  program  replaced  the  old  pattern  of 
employing  executives  from  other,  usually  smaller,  establishments, 


172  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

where  they  had  acquired  merchandising  experience.  Before,  the 
'primary  qualification  for  the  job  was  merchandise  experience'; 
now,  the  prerequisites  were  'formal  training  and  general  cul- 
tural background/  College  people,  entering  the  store  when  rela- 
tively young,  can  be  provided  with  the  experience  necessary  for 
higher  posts.  Today,  'A  large  proportion  of  the  executives  .  .  . 
are  persons  who  were  selected  and  trained  15  or  20  years  ago 
for  the  very  positions  they  now  hold.' 

The  department  store  has  thus  built  into  itself  a  career  pattern; 
it  selects  appHcants  carefully  on  each  level;  then  its  own  ele- 
vators grind  slowly  upward  with  them,  ascent  being  made  pos- 
sible by  death  and  turnover  and  being  impelled  by  individual' 
ambition.  The  files  of  the  personnel  manager  and  the  accounts 
of  the  controller's  ofiBce  have  replaced  the  store-to-store  jumping 
and  the  chances  on  the  open  market. 

4.  The  Salesgirls 

One  of  the  most  crucial  changes  in  the  work-life  of  salesgirls 
over  the  last  decades  is  the  shift  in  their  relation  to  customers. 
What  has  occurred  may  be  gauged  by  comparing  the  outlook  of 
(i)  salespeople  in  small  and  middle-sized  cities,  with  (n)  sales- 
girls in  big  metropolitan  stores. 

I.  Salespeople,  as  well  as  small  merchants  in  the  small  city, 
are  often  proud  to  say  that  they  know  well  most  of  the  people 
they  serve.  Their  work  satisfactions  spring  directly  from  this  ex- 
perience of  the  personally  known  market,  from  a  communaliza- 
tion  not  with  their  superiors  or  bosses,  but  with  the  customers. 

In  the  small  towns,  salespeople  feel  they  are  learning  human 
nature  at  a  gossip  center.  'I  like  meeting  the  public;  it  broadens 
your  views  on  life,'  one  saleslady  in  her  late  fifties  in  a  medium- 
sized  jewehy  store  says.  'I  would  not  take  anything  for  the 
knowledge  I  have  gained  of  human  nature  through  my  contacts 
as  a  saleslady.'  This  theme  of  'learning  about  human  nature'  is 
explicitly  connected  with  the  small,  personally  known  character 
of  the  market.  Again,  the  comments  of  a  forty-year-old  clerk  in 
a  small  grocery  store:  'Meeting  the  people,  I  actually  make 
friends  in  a  neighborhood  store,  because  I  know  their  family 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  173 

problems  as  well  as  their  likes  and  dislikes,'  and,  'I  gain  from 
my  customers  .  .  .  confidences  which  brings  a  certain  satisfac- 
tion in  being  of  help.' 

Both  salesladies  in  department  stores  and  women  owners  of 
small  stores  borrow  prestige  from  customers.  One  saleslady  in  a 
medium-sized  department  store  says:  1  like  most  meeting  the 
public  and  being  associated  with  the  type  of  customer  with  whom 
I  come  in  contact.  The  majority  of  my  customers  are  very  high 
type;  they  are  refined  and  cultured.'  A  few  of  the  salespeople 
also  borrow  prestige  from  the  stores  in  which  they  work,  some 
even  from  handling  the  merchandise  itself.  'I  like  the  displays 
and  the  connection  with  fine  china  and  silverware.' 

The  power  to  change  people,  an  attitude  that  may  be  consid- 
ered the  opposite  of  borrowing  prestige  from  the  customer,  also 
permits  satisfaction.  'I  like  the  satisfaction  I  secure  in  my  work 
in  improving  my  customer's  appearance,'  says  a  cosmetic-counter 
woman  of  about  forty.  T  have  some  very  homely  customers,  as 
far  as  physical  features  are  concerned,  whom  I  have  transformed 
into  very  attractive  women.' 

Many  salespeople  try  to  bring  out  the  human  aspect  of  their 
work  by  expressing  an  ideology  of  'service.'  This  ideology  is  often 
anchored  (1)  in  the  feeling  of  being  worth  while:  Tt  is  a  pleas- 
ure to  serve  them.  It  makes  you  feel  you  are  necessary  and  doing 
something  worth  while';  (2)  in  the  borrowing  of  prestige  from 
customers;  (3)  in  the  feeling  of  gaining  knowledge  of  human 
nature;  (4)  in  the  tacit  though  positive  identification  with  the 
store  itself  or  with  its  owner.  Such  elements  form  the  occupa- 
tional ideology  of  salespeople  in  smaller  cities;  each  rests  upon 
and  assumes  a  small  and  personally  known  market— the  aspect 
of  their  work  that  is  primarily  responsible  for  the  main  features 
of  their  ideology.  For  the  emphasis  upon  the  Tiandling  of  people' 
brings  to  the  fore  precisely  the  experience  that  wage  and  factory 
workers  do  not  have. 

u.  Salesgirls  in  large  department  stores  of  big  cities  often 
attempt  to  borrow  prestige  from  customers,  but  in  the  big  store 
of  strangers,  the  attempt  often  fails,  and,  in  fact,  sometimes 
boomerangs  into  a  feeling  of  powerless  depression.  The  hatred 
of  customers,  often  found  in  an  intense  form,  is  one  result;  the 


174  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

customer  becomes  the  chief  target  of  hostihty;  for  she  is  an  osten- 
sible source  of  irritation,  and  usually  a  safe  target. 

Salesgirls  in  the  big  city  store  may  be  possessive  of  their  own 
'regular  customers'  and  jealous  of  other's,  but  still  when  wealthier 
customers  leave  the  store  there  is  often  much  pulldown'  talk 
about  them,  and  obvious  envy.  'The  main  thing  we  talk  about,' 
says  a  salesgirl,  'is  the  customers.  After  the  customers  go  we 
mimic  them.'  Salesgirls  often  attempt  identification  with  custom- 
ers but  often  are  frustrated.  One  must  say  'attempt'  identification 
because:  (1)  Most  customers  are  strangers,  so  that  contact  is 
brief.  (2)  Class  differences  are  frequently  accentuated  by  the 
sharp  and  depressing  contrast  between  home  and  store,  customer, 
or  commodity.  'You  work  among  lovely  things  which  you  can't 
buy,  you  see  prosperous,  comfortable  people  who  can  buy  it. 
When  you  go  home  with  your  [low  pay]  you  do  not  feel  genteel 
or  anything  but  humiliated.  You  either  half  starve  on  your  own 
or  go  home  to  mama,  as  I  do,  to  be  supported.'  (3)  Being  'at 
their  service,'  'waiting  on  them,'  is  not  conducive  to  easy  and 
gratifying  identification.  Caught  at  the  point  of  intersection  be- 
tween big  store  and  urban  mass,  the  salesgirl  is  typically  en- 
grossed in  seeing  the  customer  as  her  psychological  enemy,  rather 
than  the  store  as  her  economic  enemy. 

Today  salesgirls  for  big  stores  are  selected  from  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  applicants,  who  are  chiefly  women  between  18  and 
30  years  of  age.  Some  are  merely  waiting  to  marry;  others  are 
older  women  without  marriage  prospects;  some  are  permanent 
full-time  employees;  others  are  temporary  or  part-time.  As  a 
mobile  labor  market,  the  department  store  is  not  very  secure 
for  the  full-time  regular  worker,  broken  as  it  is  by  the  vacation- 
ing college  girl,  the  housewife,  and  the  girl  just  out  of  high  school 
still  living  at  home,  none  of  whom  must  make  a  regular  living. 

Out  of  this  variety  of  women,  and  the  interplay  of  individual 
with  the  store  and  the  flow  of  customers,  a  range  of  sales  per- 
sonalities develops.  Here  is  one  such  typology,  based  upon 
James  B.  Gale's  prolonged  and  intensive  observations  in  big 
stores. 

The  Wolf  prowls  about  and  pounces  upon  potential  cus- 
tomers: T  go  for  the  customer.  .  .  Why  should  I  wait  for  them 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  175 

to  come  to  me  when  I  can  step  out  in  the  aisles  and  grab  them? 
The  customers  seem  to  Hke  it;  it  gives  them  a  feehng  of  impor- 
tance. I  hke  it;  it  keeps  me  on  my  toes,  builds  up  my  salesbook 
.  .  .  the  buyer  likes  it  too.  .  .  Every  well-dressed  customer, 
cranky  or  not,  looks  like  a  five-dollar  bill  to  me.' 

Intensified,  the  wolf  becomes  The  Elbower,  who  is  bent  upon 
monopolizing  all  the  customers.  While  attending  to  one,  she 
answers  the  questions  of  a  second,  urges  a  third  to  be  patient, 
and  beckons  to  a  fourth  from  the  distance.  Sometimes  she  will 
literally  elbow  her  sales  colleagues  out  of  the  way.  Often  she  is 
expert  in  distinguishing  the  looker  or  small  purchaser  from  the 
big  purchaser.  'I  had  to  develop  a  rough-house  technique  here 
in  order  to  make  the  necessary  commissions.  I  just  couldn't  waste 
time  with  people  who  didn't  want  to  buy  but  who  were  just  kill- 
ing time.  And,  after  all,  why  waste  time?  Why  should  I  bother 
with  the  pikers?  Let  the  new  clerks  cut  their  teeth  on  them.  Why 
waste  good  selling  time  with  the  folks  who  can't  make  up  their 
mind,  the  ones  who  want  to  tell  you  their  life-history,  the  bargain 
wolves,  the  advice-seekers,  and  the  "I'm  just  looking"  boobs?  I 
want  the  women  who  buy  three  pairs  of  shoes  at  a  time,  stock- 
ings to  go  with  them,  and  maybe  slippers,  too.  I  believe  I  can 
satisfactorily  wait  on  five  at  a  time,  and  keep  them  happy,  so 
I  wait  on  five!  Look  at  my  salesbook  and  note  the  total  for  the 
first  five  hours  today.  Trafiic  is  good,  .  .' 

The  Charmer  focuses  the  customer  less  upon  her  stock  of 
goods  than  upon  herself.  She  attracts  the  customer  with  modu- 
lated voice,  artful  attire,  and  stance.  'It's  really  marvelous  what 
you  can  do  in  this  world  with  a  streamlined  torso  and  a  brilliant 
smile.  People  do  things  for  me,  especially  men  when  I  give  them 
that  slow  smile  and  look  up  through  my  lashes.  I  found  that  out 
long  ago,  so  why  should  I  bother  about  a  variety  of  selling  tech- 
niques when  one  technique  will  do  the  trick?  I  spend  most  of  my 
salary  on  dresses  which  accentuate  all  my  good  points.  After  all, 
a  girl  should  capitalize  on  what  she  has,  shouldn't  she?  And  you'll 
find  the  answer  in  my  commission  total  each  week.' 

The  Ingenue  Salesgirl  is  often  not  noticed;  it  is  part  of  her 
manner  to  be  self-effacing.  Still  ill  at  ease  and  often  homesick, 
still  confused  by  trying  to  apply  just-learned  rules  to  apparent 
chaos,  she  finds  a  way  out  by  attaching  herself  like  a  child 


176  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

to  whoever  will  provide  support.  'Everything  here  is  so  big. 
There  are  so  many  confusing  rules.  .  .  A  lot  of  customers  scare 
me.  They  expect  too  much  for  their  money.  If  it  wasn't  for  Miss  B. 
I'd  have  to  quit.  .  .  When  I  make  errors,  she  laughs  and  straight- 
ens me  out;  she  shows  me  how  the  cash  register  runs;  and  yes- 
terday she  spoke  severely  to  a  customer  who  was  bullying  me 
.  .  .  Handling  so  much  money  and  so  many  sales-checks  and  re- 
membering so  many  rules;  and  not  being  able  to  wear  any  pretty 
dresses,  just  blue,  grey,  black,  brown— all  this  gets  me  down.  At 
the  end  of  the  day  I'm  mostly  a  nervous  wreck.  Oh,  for  those 
easy  days  at  high  school.  .  .' 

The  Collegiate,  usually  on  a  part-time  basis  from  a  local 
campus,  makes  up  in  her  impulsive  amateurishness  for  what  she 
lacks  in  professional  restraint.  Usually  she  is  eager  to  work  and 
fresh  for  the  job,  a  more  self-confident  type  of  ingenue. 

The  Drifter  may  be  found  almost  anywhere  in  the  big  store 
except  at  her  assigned  post;  she  is  a  circulating  gossip,  concerned 
less  with  customers  and  commodities  than  with  her  colleagues. 
When  criticized  for  her  style  of  floor  behavior,  she  replies:  'I'm 
different  from  a  lot  of  the  clerks  here,  and  I  have  a  restless  energy 
driving  me  all  the  time.  I  just  can't  stay  here  at  my  counter  like 
an  elephant  chained  to  a  post,  day  in  and  day  out.  I  like  people; 
I  have  friends  all  around  the  floor;  and  I  want  to  tell  them  occa- 
sionally what  I  do  and  think  and  feel,  and  listen  to  their  ideas 
too.  I  sell  my  share,  don't  I?  I  have  good  sales  volume,  don't  I? 
I  have  to  move  around  or  I'll  go  crazy.' 

The  Social  Pretender,  well  known  among  salesgirls,  attempts 
to  create  an  image  of  herself  not  in  line  with  her  job,  usually 
inventing  a  social  and  family  background.  She  says  she  is  selling 
temporarily  for  the  experience,  and  soon  will  take  up  a  more  glit- 
tering career.  This  may  merely  amuse  her  older  sales  colleagues, 
but  it  often  pleases  the  buyer,  who  may  notice  that  the  social 
pretender  sometimes  attracts  wealthy  customers  to  her  counter. 
A  plain-clothes  man  in  a  big  store  said:  'That  gal  S —  O — 
amuses  me  because  she's  so  cute  and  such  a  phony  too.  .  .  She 
poses  here  as  a  girl  from  a  well-to-do  family  who  wants  to  sell 
just  long  enough  to  catch  the  selling  spirit,  then  become  an 
assistant  buyer  long  enough  to  get  a  good  flair  for  style,  and  then 
flutter  back  to  her  family's  gold-plated  bosom  and  on  to  a  wealthy 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  }77 

marriage.  She  was  telling  one  of  her  side-kicks  there  this  morn- 
ing that  she  "didn't  need  the  money;  this  was  just  an  exciting 
proletariat  experience"  for  her.  Experience,  my  eye!  She  needs 
the  dough  and  needs  it  badly  or  I  miss  my  guess.  At  that,  though, 
she  gives  a  damn  good  imitation  of  one  of  those  spoiled  Park  Ave- 
nue darlings  .  . ..  keep  your  eye  open  for  these  phonies;  you'll 
see  a  couple  in  every  department.' 

The  Old-Timer,  with  a  decade  or  more  of  experience  in  the 
store,  becomes  either  a  disgruntled  rebel  or  a  completely  accom- 
modated saleswoman.  In  either  case,  she  is  the  backbone  of  the 
salesforce,  the  cornerstone  around  which  it  is  built.  As  a  rebel, 
the  old-timer  seems  to  focus  upon  neither  herself  nor  her  mer- 
chandise, but  upon  the  store:  she  is  against  its  policies,  other 
personnel,  and  often  she  turns  her  sarcasm  and  rancor  upon  the 
customer.  Many  salesgirls  claim  to  hate  the  store  and  the  cus- 
tomers; the  rebel  enjoys  hating  them,  in  fact,  she  lives  off  her 
hatred,  although  she  can  be  quick  to  defend  the  store  to  a  cus- 
tomer. Older  women,  who  have  transferred  from  one  department 
to  another,  make  up  the  majority  of  this  type.  'In  those  days  the 
customers  were  nearly  all  ladies  and  gentlemen,  really  different 
from  these  phonies  that  come  in  here  today  from  all  around. 
They  scream  about  the  merchandise  and  scream  about  the  serv- 
ice, and  I  just  give  'em  a  deadpan  face  and  a  chilly  stare,  and 
ignore  them.  When  I  get  good  and  ready  I  wait  on  them.  I  get 
sick  of  listening  to  them.  I  also  get  tired  of  hearing  talk  about 
the  rules  and  the  regulations;  I  even  get  tired  of  eating  the  half- 
cooked  food  they  toss  at  me  in  the  cafeteria  after  standing  in 
line  twenty  minutes  while  [some  people]  try  to  decide  whether 
to  have  kale  or  alfalfa  for  their  noon  roughage.  Yes,  there  is  a  lot 
of  change  here,  but  nothing  really  new:  just  the  same  old  rules 
and  same  old  stuff  about  selling  approaches  and  customer  types 
—old  stuff,  I  say,  with  different  words,  more  angles,  new  bosses. 
Every  boss  I  ever  had  here  pushed  me  around  until  now  I  take 
it  almost  as  a  matter  of  course.'  'The  buyer  just  hates  me  but  I've 
been  here  so  long  there  isn't  much  he  can  do  about  it.  As  long 
as  my  sales  volume  keeps  up— and  it's  always  been  very  good— he 
can  only  criticize  me  on  small  stuff.  Buyers  and  I  never  did  get 
along  very  well,  and  I've  seen  a  lot  of  them  come  and  go.  They 
want  this  and  then  they  want  that  and  after  that  it's  something 


178  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

else,  always  carping  around  about  one  thing  or  another.  I  often 
wonder  if  they  believe  it  themselves.  .  .  They  bum  me  up  with 
their  "new  selling  techniques"  and  all  the  rest  of  that  crap.  After 
seventeen  years  here  I  don't  need  advice  or  instruction  in  selling 
ways.  They  aren't  kidding  me;  I've  had  their  number  for  years. 
The  present  buyer  isn't  kidding  me  either.  He  goes  for  youth  and 
the  stream-lined  torso.  .  .  To  hell  with  all  of  them— I  work  for 
me  first,  last,  always;  and  the  customers  and  the  store  can  take 
it  and  like  it.  You  ask  me  then  why  I  stay  here.  I'm  not  sure  I 
could  do  anything  else.  I  get  up,  I  wash  and  dress  and  eat,  and 
I  put  on  my  things  and  come  to  Macy's.  It's  almost  automatic; 
in  fact  several  times  I  did  all  that  on  Sundays,  once  actually  get- 
ting as  far  as  the  train  before  I  came  to  and  realized  it  was 
Sunday.  Just  an  old  fire-horse  listening  for  the  bell,  that's  me.' 
The  accommodated  old-timer  has  become  gentle  and  com- 
placent. T  came  here,  as  part-time  help,  one  November  in  the 
Christmas  season.  I  have  been  very  happy  here  and  have  never 
wanted  to  leave  here  or  to  work  in  any  other  store.  .  .  Last  year 
I  got  my  Twenty-Five-Year-Club  pin;  it  makes  me  feel  like 
someone  and  it  looks  nice  with  this  blue  dress,  doesn't  it?  .  .  . 
That's  not  bad,  is  it,  for  an  old  lady  putting  her  daughter  through 
school.  This  store  and  my  daughter  are  my  whole  life.  See  that 
young  girl  over  there.  .  .  She's  a  new  girl,  and  she  reminds  me 
of  my  Jennie.  I  am  sponsoring  her;  you  know,  teaching  her  the 
ropes,  showing  her  how  to  get  started  correctly.  I  like  that;  I 
sponsor  nearly  all  the  new  people  in  the  department.  I  teach 
them  that  we  have  a  fine  department  in  a  fine  store,  and  that  the 
customer  is  important,  because,  after  all,  if  it  wasn't  for  the  cus- 
tomers, none  of  us  would  have  our  nice  jobs  here.' 

5.  The  Centralization  of  Salesmanship 

Salesmanship  seems  a  frenzied  affair  of  flexibility  and  pep;  the 
managerial  demiurge,  a  cold  machinery  of  calculation  and  plan- 
ning. Yet  the  conflict  between  them  is  only  on  the  surface:  in 
the  new  society,  salesmanship  is  much  too  important  to  be  left 
to  pep  alone  or  to  the  personal  flair  of  detached  salesmen.  Since 
the  first  decade  of  the  century,  much  bureaucratic  attention  has 
been  given  to  the  gap  between  mass  production  and  individual 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  179 

consumption.  Salesmanship  is  an  attempt  to  fill  that  gap.  In  it, 
as  in  material  fabrication,  large-scale  production  has  been  insti- 
tuted, in  the  form  of  reliable  salespeople  and  willing  customers. 
The  dominant  motive  has  been  to  lower  the  costs  of  selling  per 
head;  the  dominant  technique,  to  standardize  and  rationalize  the 
processes  of  salesmanship,  not  only  in  the  obvious  sense  of  mass 
retailing  in  department  stores,  but  in  the  technique  and  organi- 
zation of  selling  everywhere. 

In  selling,  as  elsewhere,  centralization  has  meant  the  expropri- 
ation of  certain  traits  previously  found  in  creative  salesmen,  by  a 
machinery  that  codifies  these  traits  and  controls  their  acquisition 
and  display  by  individual  salesmen.  The  rise  of  absentee  selling, 
rooted  in  the  mass  media,  has  done  much  to  spur  these  centraliz- 
ing and  rationalizing  trends.  From  the  very  beginning,  absentee 
selling,  being  expensive,  has  been  in  the  hands  of  top  manage- 
ment, which  has  had  its  use  studied,  probably  more  carefully 
than  any  other  activity  in  modern  society. 

In  the  1850's,  one  large  store  in  Philadelphia  began  to  letter 
all  departments,  and  to  number  each  row  on  each  shelf.  From 
the  proprietor's  desk  tubes  ran  to  every  department:  from  each 
department,  pages  ran  with  parcels  and  money  and  bills  to  the 
cashier's  cage  and  back  to  the  seller's  counter.  No  salesperson 
needed  to  leave  his  station;  from  his  position  at  the  center,  the 
proprietor  could,  at  any  time,  a  contemporary  observer  states, 
'form  a  just  estimate  of  the  relative  value  of  the  services  of  each, 
in  proportion  to  his  salary,'  and  thus  'to  speak  understandingly  of 
the  capabilities  and  business  qualities  of  any  of  his  employees.'  In 
New  York,  at  about  the  same  time,  a  proprietor  wrote:  'There  is 
but  one  mark  on  the  Goods,  and  that  is  the  selling  mark,  and  no 
clerk  in  my  store  knows  any  other  mark  but  that.'  This  meant  that 
both  clerk  and  customer  were  expropriated  of  higgling  and  bar- 
gaining. 

All  along  the  line,  the  entrepreneurial  aspects  of  the  sales- 
clerk's  role  have  been  expropriated  by  the  rationalized  division 
of  labor.  If  the  entrepreneur  himself  does  not  sell,  he  has  to 
have  one  price;  he  cannot  trust  clerks  to  bargain  successfully. 
One-price  is  part  of  the  bureaucratization  of  salesmanship.  It  also 


180  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

is  fair  to  the  customer,  who  is  also  bureaucratized  and  cannot 
higgle.  All  are  equal  before  the  machine  of  salesmanship,  and 
things  are  under  control. 

The  detached  creative  salesman  is  disappearing  and  the  man 
who  is  taking  his  place  is  neither  detached  nor  so  creative  in  the 
old  sense.  Small-scale  retailing,  of  course,  continues  with  its 
handicraft  methods  of  creating  and  maintaining  the  customer, 
but  in  the  big  store,  and  on  the  road,  the  role  of  the  individual 
salesperson  has  been  circumscribed  and  standardized  in  every 
possible  feature,  and  thus  the  salesperson  has  been  made  highly 
replaceable.  The  old  'manufacturer's  representative,'  who  sold  to 
retailers  and  wholesalers,  was  supervised  very  little;  he  was  on 
his  own  in  manner  and  even  in  territory.  The  new  commercial 
traveler  is  one  unit  in  an  elaborate  marketing  organization.  What 
he  says  and  what  he  can't  say  is  put  down  for  him  in  his  sales 
manual.  Even  though  he  feels  that  he  is  a  man  with  a  proposition 
looking  for  someone  to  tie  it  to,  his  very  presentation  of  propo- 
sition, product,  and  self  is  increasingly  given  to  him,  increasingly 
standardized  and  tested.  Sales  executives,  representing  the  force 
that  is  centralizing  and  rationalizing  salesmanship,  have  moved 
to  the  top  levels  of  the  big  companies.  The  brains  in  salesman- 
ship, the  personal  flair,  have  been  centralized  from  scattered  indi- 
viduals and  are  now  managed  by  those  who  standardize  and  test 
the  presentation  which  the  salesmen  memorize  and  adapt. 

It  used  to  be,  and  still  is  in  many  cases,  that  the  man  on  the 
road  could  become  a  virtual  prima  donna  of  the  organization: 
in  the  end  the  success  of  the  business  depended  on  him  and  if 
he  could  capture  a  given  set  of  important  customers  he  might 
high-jack  his  company  with  the  threat  of  taking  himself  and 
these  customers  to  another  company.  Rationalization  is  in  part 
an  attempt  to  meet  this  threat.  The  vice  president  of  one  large 
company,  in  speaking  of  the  status  and  power  of  such  salesmen 
and  the  threat  they  may  come  to  have  over  a  company,  says: 
'The  first  thing  I'm  going  to  do  is  to  make  up  a  presentation,  with 
clear  charts  and  telling  slogans.  Maybe  it  will  be  a  turnover 
booklet,  maybe  even  a  sound  film.  Then  I'm  going  to  hire  me  a 
bunch  of  salaried  men  and  teach  them  how  to  show  this  presen- 
tation. They  can  still  get  in  the  personal  adaptation  of  it  to  dif- 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  181 

ferent  clients  they're  handling,  but  they  will  damn  well  give  that 
presentation  the  way  I  want  it  given  and  there's  not  going  to 
be  any  high-priced  prima-donna  stuff  about  that.  I'll  pay  plenty 
to  have  the  presentation  made  and  tested;  I'll  get  experts  and 
pay  them  expert's  salaries  on  that,  but  every  salesman  isn't  going 
to  be  paid  like  an  expert.' 

It  is,  of  course,  precisely  with  such  'presentations'  that  adver- 
tising crosses  the  personal  arts  of  salesmanship.  But  advertising 
of  every  sort  is  also  an  adjunct  of  the  salesman,  which  at  times 
threatens  to  displace  many  of  his  skills.  Selling  becomes  a  per- 
vasive process,  of  which  the  personal  salesman,  crucial  though 
he  may  be,  is  only  one  link. 

If  selling  is  broken  down  into  its  component  steps,  it  becomes 
clear  that  the  first  three— contacting,  arousing  interest,  creating 
preference— are  now  done  by  advertising.  Two  final  steps  are 
left  to  the  salesman:  making  the  specific  proposal,  and  closing 
the  order.  The  better  the  first  three  jobs  are  done  by  the  absentee 
salesman,  the  more  the  salesman  can  concentrate  on  the  two 
pay-off  jobs.  But  as  the  presentation  and  the  visual  aids  move  in 
they  displace  the  personal  flair  of  the  salesman  even  in  the  pay- 
off jobs.  Moreover,  the  salesman  himself  becomes  an  object  of 
standardization  in  the  way  he  is  selected  and  trained,  so  that  his 
personal  development  as  a  salesman  becomes  subject  to  cen- 
tralized control. 

Selling  was  once  an  aspect  of  the  artisan's  or  farmer's  role; 
the  sale  was  an  integral  but  not  very  important  aspect  of  the 
whole  craft  or  job.  With  specialization  some  men  began  to  do 
nothing  but  sell,  although  they  were  still  related  by  ownership 
to  the  commodities  they  handled.  They  judged  the  market  and 
higgled  over  the  price,  selling  or  not  selling  as  they  themselves 
decided. 

As  the  organization  of  the  market  becomes  tighter,  the  sales- 
man loses  autonomy.  He  sells  the  goods  of  others,  and  has  noth- 
ing to  do  with  the  pricing.  He  is  alienated  from  price  fixing  and 
product  selection.  Finally,  the  last  autonomous  feature  of  selling, 
the  art  of  persuasion  and  the  sales  personality  involved,  becomes 
expropriated  from  the  individual  salesman.  Such  has  been  the 
general  tendency  and  drift,  in  the  store  as  well  as  on  the  road. 


182  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

6.   The  Personality  Market 

In  the  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur,  men  sold  goods  to  one 
another;  in  the  new  society  of  employees,  they  first  of  all  sell 
their  services.  The  employer  of  manual  services  buys  the  workers' 
labor,  energy,  and  skill;  the  employer  of  many  white-collar  serv- 
ices, especially  salesmanship,  also  buys  the  employees'  social  per- 
sonalities. Working  for  wages  with  another's  industrial  property 
involves  a  sacrifice  of  time,  power,  and  energy  to  the  employer; 
workipg  as  a  salaried  employee  often  involves  in  addition  the 
sacrifice  of  one's  self  to  a  multitude  of  'consumers'  or  clients  or 
managers.  The  relevance  of  personality  traits  to  the  often  monot- 
onous tasks  at  hand  is  a  major  source  of  'occupational  disability,' 
and  requires  that  in  any  theory  of  'increasing  misery'  attention 
be  paid  to  the  psychological  aspects  of  white-collar  work. 

In  a  society  of  employees,  dominated  by  the  marketing  men- 
tality, it  is  inevitable  that  a  personalit>'  market  should  arise. 
For  in  the  great  shift  from  manual  skills  to  the  art  of  'handling,' 
selling,  and  servicing  people,  personal  or  even  intimate  traits  of 
the  employee  are  drawn  into  the  sphere  of  exchange  and  become 
of  commercial  relevance,  become  commodities  in  the  labor  mar- 
ket. Whenever  there  is  a  transfer  of  control  over  one  individual's 
personal  traits  to  another  for  a  price,  a  sale  of  those  traits  which 
affect  one's  impressions  upon  others,  a  personality  market  arises. 

The  shift  from  skills  with  things  to  skills  with  persons;  from 
small,  informal,  to  large,  organized  firms;  and  from  the  intimate 
local  markets  to  the  large  anonymous  market  of  the  metropolitan 
area— these  have  had  profound  psychological  results  in  the  white- 
collar  ranks. 

One  knows  the  salesclerk  not  as  a  person  but  as  a  commercial 
mask,  a  stereotyped  greeting  and  appreciation  for  patronage; 
one  need  not  be  kind  to  the  modern  laundryman,  one  need  only 
pay  him;  he,  in  turn,  needs  only  to  be  cheerful  and  efficient. 
Kindness  and  friendliness  become  aspects  of  personalized  service 
or  of  public  relations  of  big  firms,  rationalized  to  further  the  sale 
of  something.  With  anonymous  insincerity  the  Successful  Person 
thus  makes  an  instrument  of  his  own  appearance  and  personality. 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  183 

There  are  three  conditions  for  a  stabiHzed  personaHty  market: 
First,  an  employee  must  be  part  of  a  bureaucratic  enterprise, 
selected,  trained,  and  supervised  by  a  higher  authority.  Second, 
from  within  this  bureaucracy,  his  regular  business  must  be  to 
contact  the  public  so  as  to  present  the  firm's  good  name  before 
all  comers.  Third,  a  large  portion  of  this  public  must  be  anony- 
mous, a  mass  of  urban  strangers. 

The  expansion  of  distribution,  the  declining  proportion  of 
small  independent  merchants,  and  the  rise  of  anonymous  urban 
markets  mean  that  more  and  more  people  are  in  this  position. 
Salespeople  in  large  stores  are  of  course  under  rules  and  regula- 
tions that  stereotype  their  relations  with  the  customer.  The  sales- 
person can  only  display  pre-priced  goods  and  persuade  the  ac- 
ceptance of  them.  In  this  task  she  uses  her  'personality.'  She  must 
remember  that  she  'represents'  the  'management';  and  loyalty  to 
that  anonymous  organization  requires  that  she  be  friendly,  help- 
ful, tactful,  and  courteous  at  all  times.  One  of  the  floorwalker's 
tasks  is  to  keep  the  clerks  friendly,  and  most  large  stores  employ 
'personnel  shoppers'  who  check  up  and  make  reports  on  clerks' 
'personality.' 

Many  salesgirls  are  quite  aware  of  the  difference  between 
what  they  really  think  of  the  customer  and  how  they  must  act 
toward  her.  The  smile  behind  the  counter  is  a  commercialized 
lure.  Neglect  of  personal  appearance  on  the  part  of  the  em- 
ployee is  a  form  of  carelessness  on  the  part  of  the  business  man- 
agement. 'Self-control'  pays  off.  'Sincerity'  is  detrimental  to  one's 
job,  until  the  rules  of  salesmanship  and  business  become  a  'genu- 
ine' aspect  of  oneself.  Tact  is  a  series  of  little  lies  about  one's 
feelings,  until  one  is  emptied  of  such  feelings.  'Dignity'  may  be 
used  only  to  make  a  customer  feel  that  she  shouldn't  ask  the 
price  too  soon  or  fail  to  buy  the  wares.  Dixon  Wector,  who 
writes  that  'It  has  justly  been  remarked  that  the  filling  station 
attendant  has  done  more  to  raise  the  standard  of  courtesy  en 
masse  in  the  United  States  than  all  the  manuals  of  etiquette,' 
does  not  see  that  this  is  an  impersonal  ceremonial,  having  little 
to  do  psychologically  with  old-fashioned  'feeling  for  another.' 

In  the  formulas  of  'personnel  experts,'  men  and  women  are  to 
be  shaped  into  the  'well-rounded,  acceptable,  effective  personal- 
ity.' Just  like  small  proprietors,  the  model  sales  employees  com- 


184  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

pete  with  one  another  in  terms  of  services  and  'personaUty'; 
but  unlike  proprietors,  they  cannot  higgle  over  prices,  which 
are  fixed,  or  'judge  the  market'  and  accordingly  buy  wisely.  Ex- 
perts judge  the  market  and  speciaHsts  buy  the  commodities.  The 
salesgirl  cannot  form  her  character  by  promotional  calculations 
and  self-management,  like  the  classic  heroes  of  liberalism  or  the 
new  entrepreneurs.  The  one  area  of  her  occupational  life  in  which 
she  might  be  'free  to  act,'  the  area  of  her  own  personality,  must 
now  also  be  managed,  must  become  the  alert  yet  obsequious  in- 
strument by  which  goods  are  distributed. 

In  the  normal  course  of  her  work,  because  her  personality  be- 
comes the  instrument  of  an  ahen  purpose,  the  salesgirl  becomes 
self-alienated.  In  one  large  department  store,  a  planted  observer 
said  of  one  girl:  'I  have  been  watching  her  for  three  days  now. 
She  wears  a  fixed  smile  on  her  made-up  face,  and  it  never  varies, 
no  matter  to  whom  she  speaks.  I  never  heard  her  laugh  spon- 
taneously or  naturally.  Either  she  is  frowning  or  her  face  is 
devoid  of  any  expression.  When  a  customer  approaches,  she  im- 
mediately assumes  her  hard,  forced  smile.  It  amazes  me  because, 
although  I  know  that  the  smiles  of  most  salesgirls  are  unreal, 
I've  never  seen  such  calculation  given  to  the  timing  of  a  smile. 
I  myself  tried  to  copy  such  an  expression,  but  I  am  unable  to 
keep  such  a  smile  on  my  face  if  it  is  not  sincerely  and  genuinely 
motivated.' 

The  personality  market  is  subject  to  the  laws  of  supply  and 
demand:  when  a  'seller's  market'  exists  and  labor  is  hard  to  buy, 
the  well-earned  aggressions  of  the  salespeople  come  out  and 
jeopardize  the  good  will  of  the  buying  public.  When  there  is  a 
'buyer's  market'  and  jobs  are  hard  to  get,  the  salespeople  must 
again  practice  politeness.  Thus,  as  in  an  older  epoch  of  capital- 
ism, the  laws  of  supply  and  demand  continue  to  regulate  the 
intimate  life-fate  of  the  individual  and  the  kind  of  personality 
he  may  develop  and  display. 

Near  the  top  of  the  personality  markets  are  the  new  entre- 
preneurs and  the  bureaucratic  fixers;  at  the  bottom  are  the  people 
in  the  selling  ranks.  Both  the  new  entrepreneurs  and  the  sales 
personalities  serve  the  bureaucracies,  and  each,  in  his  own  way, 
practices  the  creative  art  of  selling  himself.  In  a  restricted  market 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  185 

economy,  salesmanship  is  truly  praised  as  a  creative  act,  but,  as 
more  alert  chieftains  have  long  been  aware,  it  is  entirely  too 
serious  a  matter  to  be  trusted  to  mere  creativity.  The  real  oppor- 
tunities for  rationalization  and  expropriation  are  in  the  field  of 
the  human  personality.  The  fate  of  competition  and  the  character 
it  will  assume  depend  upon  the  success  or  failure  of  the  adven- 
tures of  monopolists  in  this  field. 

Mass  production  standardizes  the  merchandise  to  be  sold; 
mass  distribution  standardizes  the  prices  at  which  it  is  to  be  sold. 
But  the  consumers  are  not  yet  altogether  standardized.  There 
must  be  a  link  between  mass  production  and  individual  con- 
sumption. It  is  this  link  that  the  salesman  tries  to  connect.  On 
the  one  hand,  his  selling  techniques  are  mapped  out  for  him, 
but  on  the  other,  he  must  sell  to  individuals.  Since  the  consumer 
is  usually  a  stranger,  the  salesman  must  be  a  quick  'character 
analyst.'  And  he  is  instructed  in  human  types  and  how  to  ap- 
proach each:  If  a  man  is  phlegmatic,  handle  him  with  delibera- 
tion; if  sensitive,  handle  him  with  directness;  if  opinionated, 
with  deference;  if  open-minded,  with  frankness;  if  cautious, 
handle  him  with  proof.  But  there  are  some  traits  common  to 
all  mankind,  and  hence  certain  general  methods  of  handling  any 
type:  'we  refer  now  to  a  certain  spirit  of  fraternity,  courtesy,  and 
altruism.' 

The  area  left  open  for  the  salesman's  own  creativity,  his  own 
personality,  is  now  the  area  into  which  the  sales  executives  and 
psychologists  have  begun  to  move.  This  personal  equation  is 
stressed  by  them,  but  as  it  is  stressed  it  is  rationalized  into  the 
high-powered  sales-personality  itself:  'The  time  has  come,'  it  was 
written  in  the  middle  'twenties,  'when  the  salesman  himself  must 
be  more  eflBciently  developed.'  Men  must  be  developed  who  have 
the  positive  mental  attitude.  Their  thoughts  must  'explode  into 
action.'  'The  mind  of  the  quitter  always  has  a  negative  taint.' 
The  high-powered  sales-personality  is  a  man  'who  sees  himself 
doing  it'  'Never  harbor  a  thought  unless  you  wish  to  generate 
motor  impulses  toward  carrying  it  out.  .  .  No  one  can  prevent 
such  thoughts  from  arising  in  the  mind.  They  spring  up  auto- 
matically. But  we  need  not  entertain  them.  .  .  Reject  them  abso- 
lutely. .  .'  'It  means  simply  a  quiet,  persistent  choice  to  think 
affirmatively  and  act  accordingly.  .  .  Fritz  Kreisler  practices  six 


186  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

hours  each  day  to  maintain  his  technique  upon  the  violin.  Is  it 
not  worth  while  for  the  salesman  to  practice  every  day  upon  that 
most  marvelous  instrument,  the  mind,  in  order  that  he  may 
achieve  success?'  The  high-powered  personality  gets  that  way 
by  fixing  healthy  positive  ideas  in  his  consciousness  and  then 
manipulating  himself  so  that  they  sink  into  his  subconscious 
mind:  '.  .  .  when  one  is  alone  amid  quiet  and  restful  surround- 
ings .  .  .  preferably  just  before  going  to  sleep  .  .  .  the  doorway 
.  .  .  into  the  subconscious  seems  to  be  more  nearly  ajar  than  at 
any  other  time.  If  at  that  time  one  will  repeat  over  and  over 
again  an  affirmation  of  health,  vigor,  vital  energy,  and  success, 
the  idea  will  eventually  obtain  lodgement  in  the  subconscious 
mind.  .  .' 

Employers  again  and  again  demand  the  selection  of  men  with 
personality.  A  survey  of  employment  offices  made  by  a  university 
indicated  that  'the  college  graduate  with  a  good  personality  .  .  . 
will  have  the  best  chance  of  being  hired  by  business.  .  .  More- 
over, personality  will  be  more  important  than  high  grades  for  all 
positions  except  those  in  technical  and  scientific  fields.'  The 
traits  considered  most  important  in  the  personnel  literature  are: 
'ability  to  get  along  with  people  and  to  work  co-operatively  with 
them,  ability  to  meet  and  talk  to  people  easily,  and  attractiveness 
in  appearance.' 

In  the  literature  of  vocational  guidance,  personality  often  actu- 
ally replaces  skill  as  a  requirement:  a  personable  appearance  is 
emphasized  as  being  more  important  in  success  and  advancement 
than  experience  or  skill  or  intelligence.  'In  hiring  girls  to  sell 
neckwear,  personal  appearance  is  considered  to  outweigh  pre- 
vious experience.'  'Personality  pays  dividends  that  neither  hard 
work  nor  sheer  intelligence  alone  can  earn  for  the  average  man.' 
In  a  recent  study  of  graduates  of  Purdue  University,  'better  in- 
telligence paid  only  $150.00  a  year  bonuses,  while  personality 
paid  more  than  six  times  that  much  in  return  for  the  same  period 
and  with  the  same  men.' 

The  business  with  a  personality  market  becomes  a  training 
place  for  people  with  more  effective  personalities.  Hundreds  of 
white-collar  people  in  the  Schenley  Distillers  Corporation,  for 
example,  took  a  personality  course  in  order  to  learn  'greater 
friendliness  .  .  .  and  warmer  courtesy  .  .  .  and  genuine  interest 


THE  GREAT  SALESROOM  187 

in  helping  the  caller  at  the  reception  desk.'  As  demand  increases, 
public  schools  add  courses  that  attempt  to  meet  the  business 
demand  'for  workers  with  a  pleasant  manner.'  Since  business 
leaders  hold  that  'a  far  greater  percentage  of  personnel  lose  their 
jobs  because  of  personality  difficulties  than  because  of  ineffi- 
ciency,' the  course  features  'training  in  attitudes  of  courtesy, 
thoughtfulness  and  friendliness;  skills  of  voice  control  .  .  .'  et 
cetera.  In  Milwaukee,  a  'Charm  School'  was  recently  set  up  for 
city  employees  to  teach  them  in  eight  one-hour  classes  'the  art 
of  pleasant,  courteous,  prompt  and  efficient  service.'  Every  'step 
in  every  public  contact'  is  gone  into  and  the  employees  are  taught 
how  to  greet  and  listen  to  people. 

Elaborate  institutional  sets-ups  thus  rationally  attempt  to  pre- 
pare people  for  the  personality  market  and  sustain  them  in  their 
attempt  to  compete  on  it  successfully.  And  from  the  areas  of 
salesmanship  proper,  the  requirements  of  the  personality  market 
have  diflFused  as  a  style  of  life.  What  began  as  the  public  and 
commercial  relations  of  business  have  become  deeply  personal: 
there  is  a  public-relations  aspect  to  private  relations  of  all  sorts, 
including  even  relations  with  oneself.  The  new  ways  are  diffused 
by  charm  and  success  schools  and  by  best-seller  literature.  The 
sales  personality,  built  and  maintained  for  operation  on  the  per- 
sonality market,  has  become  a  dominating  type,  a  pervasive 
model  for  imitation  for  masses  of  people,  in  and  out  of  selling. 
The  literature  of  self-improvement  has  generalized  the  traits  and 
tactics  of  salesmanship  for  the  population  at  large.  In  this  litera- 
ture all  men  can  be  leaders.  The  poor  and  the  unsuccessful  simply 
do  not  exist,  except  by  an  untoward  act  of  their  own  will. 

'A  new  aristocracy  is  springing  up  in  the  world  today,  an  aris- 
tocracy of  personal  charm,'  each  of  whose  members  treats  every- 
one else  as  his  superior,  while  repeating  to  himself  that  he  is  the 
biggest  and  most  important  man  in  the  world.  It  is  a  magnetic 
society  where  every  man  is  not  only  his  own  executive  but 
secretly,  everyone  else's  too.* 

The  personality  market,  the  most  decisive  effect  and  symptom 
of  the  great  salesroom,  underlies  the  all-pervasive  distrust  and 

•  These  statements  are  based  on  a  thematic  examination  of  seven  or 
eight  inspirational  books,  including  Dale  Carnegie's  classic,  How  to 
Win  Friends  and  Influence  People. 


188  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

self-alienation  so  characteristic  of  metropolitan  people.  Without 
common  values  and  mutual  trust,  the  cash  nexus  that  links  one 
man  to  another  in  transient  contact  has  been  made  subtle  in  a 
dozen  ways  and  made  to  bite  deeper  into  all  areas  of  life  and 
relations.  People  are  required  by  the  salesman  ethic  and  conven- 
tion to  pretend  interest  in  others  in  order  to  manipulate  them. 
In  the  course  of  time,  and  as  this  ethic  spreads,  it  is  got  on  to. 
Still,  it  is  conformed  to  as  part  of  one's  job  and  one's  style  of  life, 
but  now  with  a  winking  eye,  for  one  knows  that  manipulation 
is  inherent  in  every  human  contact.  Men  are  estranged  from 
one  another  as  each  secretly  tries  to  make  an  instrument  of  the 
other,  and  in  time  a  full  circle  is  made:  one  makes  an  instrument 
of  himself,  and  is  estranged  from  It  also. 


9 


The  Enormous  File 


As  skyscrapers  replace  rows  of  small  shops,  so  oflBces  replace 
free  markets.  Each  oflBce  within  the  skyscraper  is  a  segment  of 
the  enormous  file,  a  part  of  the  symbol  factory  that  produces  the 
billion  slips  of  paper  that  gear  modern  society  into  its  daily 
shape.  From  the  executive's  suite  to  the  factory  yard,  the  paper 
webwork  is  spun;  a  thousand  rules  you  never  made  and  don't 
know  about  are  applied  to  you  by  a  thousand  people  you  have 
not  met  and  never  will.  The  office  is  the  Unseen  Hand  become 
visible  as  a  row  of  clerks  and  a  set  of  IBM  equipment,  a  pool  of 
dictaphone  transcribers,  and  sixty  receptionists  confronting  the 
elevators,  one  above  the  other,  on  each  floor. 

The  office  is  also  a  place  of  work.  In  the  morning  irregular 
rows  of  people  enter  the  skyscraper  monument  to  the  office  cul- 
ture. During  the  day  they  do  their  little  part  of  the  business  sys- 
tem, the  government  system,  the  war-system,  the  money-system, 
co-ordinating  the  machinery,  commanding  each  other,  persuad- 
ing the  people  of  other  worlds,  recording  the  activities  that  make 
up  the  nation's  day  of  work.  They  transmit  the  printed  culture 
to  the  next  day's  generation.  And  at  night,  after  the  people  leave 
the  skyscrapers,  the  streets  are  empty  and  inert,  and  the  hand  is 
unseen  again. 

The  ofiBce  may  be  only  a  bundle  of  papers  in  a  satchel  in  the 
back  of  somebody's  car;  or  it  may  be  a  block  square,  each  floor  a 
set  of  glass  rabbit  warrens,  the  whole  a  headquarters  for  a  nation- 
wide organization  of  other  offices,  as  well  as  plants  and  mines 

189 


190  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

and  even  farms.  It  may  be  attached  to  one  department,  division, 
or  unit,  tying  it  to  another  oflRce  which  acts  as  the  command  post 
for  all  the  oflBces  in  the  enterprise  as  a  whole.  And  some  enter- 
prises, near  the  administrative  centers  of  the  economic  file,  are 
nothing  more  than  offices. 

But,  however  big  or  little  and  whatever  the  shape,  the  mini- 
mum function  of  an  office  is  to  direct  and  co-ordinate  the  activi- 
ties of  an  enterprise.  For  every  business  enterprise,  every  factory, 
is  tied  to  some  office  and,  by  virtue  of  what  happens  there,  is 
linked  to  other  businesses  and  to  the  rest  of  the  people.  Scat- 
tered throughout  the  political  economy,  each  office  is  the  peak 
of  a  pyramid  of  work  and  money  and  decision. 

'When  we  picture  in  our  minds,'  says  an  earnest  assistant  gen- 
eral manager,  'the  possibility  for  absolute  control  over  the  multi- 
tude of  individual  clerical  operations  through  a  control  of  forms 
.  .  .  the  most  important  items  .  .  .  arteries  through  which  the 
life  blood  flows.  .  .  Every  function  of  every  man  or  woman  in 
every  department  takes  place  by  means  of,  or  is  ultimately  re- 
corded on,  an  office  or  plant  form.' 

1.  The  Old  Office 

Just  the  other  day  the  first  typist  in  the  city  of  Philadelphia, 
who  had  served  one  firm  60  years,  died  at  the  age  of  80.  During 
her  last  days  she  recalled  how  it  was  in  the  earlier  days.  She 
had  come  into  the  office  from  her  employer's  Sunday  school  class 
in  1882.  She  remembered  when  the  office  was  one  rather  dark 
room,  the  windows  always  streaked  with  dust  from  the  outside, 
and  often  fogged  with  smoke  from  the  potbellied  stove  in  the 
middle  of  the  room.  She  remembered  the  green  eyeshade  and 
the  cash  book,  the  leather-bound  ledger  and  the  iron  spike  on 
the  desk  top,  the  day  book  and  the  quill  pen,  the  letter  press 
and  the  box  file. 

At  first  there  were  only  three  in  the  office:  at  the  high  roll-top 
desk,  dominating  the  room,  sat  the  owner;  on  a  stool  before  a 
high  desk  with  a  slanted  top  and  thin  legs  hunched  the  book- 
keeper; and  near  the  door,  before  a  table  that  held  the  new 
machine,  sat  the  white-collar  girl. 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  191 

The  bookkeeper,  A.  B.  Nordin,  Jr.  recently  told  the  National 
Association  ot  Office  Managers,  was  an  'old-young  man,  slightly 
stoop-shouldered,  with  a  sallow  complexion,  usually  dyspeptic- 
looking,  with  black  sleeves  and  a  green  eyeshade.  .  .  Regard- 
less of  the  kind  of  business,  regardless  of  their  ages,  they  all 
looked  alike.  ,  .'  He  seemed  tired,  and  'he  was  never  quite  happy, 
because  .  .  .  his  face  betrayed  the  strain  of  working  toward 
that  climax  of  his  month's  labors.  He  was  usually  a  neat  pen- 
man, but  his  real  pride  was  in  his  ability  to  add  a  column  of 
figures  rapidly  and  accurately.  In  spite  of  this  accomplishment, 
however,  he  seldom,  if  ever,  left  his  ledger  for  a  more  promising 
position.  His  mind  was  atrophied  by  that  destroying,  hopeless 
influence  of  drudgery  and  routine  work.  He  was  little  more  than 
a  figuring  machine  with  an  endless  number  of  figure  combina- 
tions learned  by  heart.  His  feat  was  a  feat  of  memory.' 

Of  course  there  had  been  bookkeepers  long  before  the  'eighties; 
Dickens  wrote  about  just  such  men;  and,  as  Thomas  Cochran 
and  William  Miller  have  observed,  as  early  as  the  1820's  fear 
was  expressed  in  New  York  State  that  this  new  alpaca-clad  man 
would  join  with  factory  owners  and  even  factory  workers  to  rout 
the  landed  aristocracy. 

But  the  office  girl  in  the  'eighties  and  'nineties  saw  the  book- 
keeper at  the  very  center  of  the  office  world.  He  recorded  all 
transactions  in  the  day  book,  the  journal,  the  cash  book,  or  the 
ledger;  all  the  current  orders  and  memoranda  were  speared  on 
his  iron  spike;  on  his  desk  and  in  the  squat  iron  safe  or  inside 
two  open  shelves  or  drawers  with  box  files  were  all  the  papers 
which  the  office  and  its  staff  served. 

The  girl  in  the  office  struggling  with  the  early  typewriters  spent 
at  least  15  minutes  every  morning  cleaning  and  oiling  her  mas- 
sive but  awkwardly  delicate  machine.  At  first  typing  was  tedious 
because  she  could  not  see  what  she  was  typing  on  the  double- 
keyboard  machine  without  moving  it  up  three  spaces,  but  after  a 
while  she  seldom  had  to  see.  She  also  whittled  pencils,  and 
worked  the  letter  press,  a  curious  device  at  which  people  had 
gazed  during  the  1893  Chicago  World's  Fair,  which  made  a  dim 
copy  from  the  ink  of  the  original  letter. 

The  man  at  the  big  roll-top  desk  was  often  absent  during  the 
day,  although  his  cigar  smoke  hung  in  the  air.  Later  there  was 


192  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

an  office  boy  who  went  on  many  errands,  but  in  the  pre-telephone 
office,  the  owner  had  often  to  make  personal  calls  to  transact 
business.  This  personal  contact  with  the  outside  world  was  paral- 
leled by  relations  inside  the  office;  the  center  was  in  personal 
contact  with  the  circumference  and  received  'its  impetus  there- 
from.' As  Balzac  wrote  of  early  offices,  'there  was  devotion  on 
one  side  and  trust  on  the  other.'  As  those  on  the  circumference 
were  being  trained,  some  could  look  to  gaining  a  rounded  view 
of  the  business  and  in  due  course  to  moving  to  more  responsible 
positions. 

2.  Forces  and  Developments 

The  era  of  this  old  office  was  a  long  one;  in  the  United  States 
it  did  not  really  begin  to  change  shape  until  the  'nineties.  Since 
then,  lYiany  and  drastic  changes  have  occurred,  but  unevenly: 
offices  still  exist  that  are  basically  not  different  from  the  old  office, 
but  other  offices  seemingly  have  little  resemblance  to  the  nine- 
teenth-century structure.  The  unevenness  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
offices  are  attached  to  all  forms  of  enterprise,  many  of  which  are 
small,  many  big.  It  is  especially  in  the  big  offices  of  the  'office 
industries'  that  the  new  type  has  emerged— the  insurance,  bank- 
ing, and  financial  lines,  for  example.  The  later  history  of  the 
office,  as  adapted  from  W.  H.  Leffingwell,  may  be  described  in 
terms  of  the  following  developments: 

I.  Under  the  impetus  of  concentrated  enterprise  and  finance, 
when  the  office  was  enlarged  during  the  first  decade  of  the  twen- 
tieth century,  a  need  was  felt  for  a  systematic  arrangement  of 
business  facts.  The  numerical  file,  with  an  alphabetical  index, 
was  devised  and  came  into  broad  use.  Alongside  the  bookkeeper 
and  the  stenographer,  the  clerk  came  to  man  often  complicated 
'systems.'  As  the  army  of  clerks  grew,  they  were  divided  into  de- 
partments, specialized  in  function,  and  thus,  before  machines 
were  introduced  on  any  scale,  socially  rationalized.  The  work  was 
reorganized  in  a  systematic  and  divided  manner. 

n.  It  was  this  social  reorganization,  under  the  impetus  of  work 
load,  higher  cost,  and  the  need  for  files  and  figures,  that  made 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  193 

possible  wide  application  of  ofBce  machines.  Machines  did  not 
begin  to  be  used  widely  until  the  second  decade  of  the  century. 
A  practical  typewriter  existed  in  1874  but  it  was  1900  before  any 
considerable  use  of  it  was  made;  a  non-listing  adding  machine 
was  invented  in  the  late  'eighties,  but  only  in  the  early  twentieth 
century  was  it  used  widely.  Thus,  machines  did  not  impel  the 
development,  but  rather  the  development  demanded  machines, 
many  of  which  were  actually  developed  especially  for  tasks  al- 
ready socially  created. 

Office  machines  became  important  during  the  World  War  I 
era.  Already  convinced  of  the  need  for  a  systematic  approach, 
and  pressed  by  the  need  for  more  and  more  statistics,  managers 
began  to  use  the  machine  more  and  more  to  handle  the  existing 
systems.  In  1919,  the  National  Association  of  Office  Managers 
was  formed  under  the  aegis  of  Frederick  Taylor's  ideas  of  sci- 
entffic  management.  In  the  six  or  seven  years  before  1921,  at  least 
a  hundred  new  office  machines  a  year  were  put  on  the  market. 
By  the  latter  half  of  the  'twenties,  most  offices  of  any  size  were 
equipped  with  many  types;  by  1930,  according  to  one  govern- 
ment survey,  some  30  per  cent  of  the  women  in  offices  were, 
in  the  course  of  at  least  part  of  their  work,  using  machines  other 
than  typewriters.  Eight  years  later,  well  over  a  million  office 
workers  were.  Today  it  is  repeatedly  asserted  that  at  least  80 
per  cent  of  office  jobs  can  be  mechanized. 

Yet,  it  has  to  be  recognized  that  in  the  twenty  years  before 
World  War  II,  there  was  a  lag  in  the  office's  industrial  revolu- 
tion: office  employment  rose  faster  than  office  machines  were 
introduced.  The  number  of  office  people  rose  steadily  since 
1900,  but  office-machine  sales  remained  at  relatively  low  levels. 
World  War  II  gave  the  real  impetus  to  office  technology:  the 
prewar  rate  of  office-machine  sales  was  about  270  million  dollars; 
by  1948  it  was  grossing  one  billion.  Before  the  war  there  was 
serious  talk  of  office  decentralization  in  order  to  lower  office 
costs;  now  new  office  machines,  as  one  business  journal  puts  it, 
make  bigness  workable. 

In  the  later  'forties  there  were  3000  machines  on  display  each 
year  at  business  shows.  There  is  a  mechanical  collator  whose 
metal  fingers  snatch  sheets  of  paper  from  five  piles  in  proper 
sequence,  and  staple  them  for  distribution.  There  are  ticket  and 


194  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

money  counters,  mechanical  erasers  and  automatic  signature 
machines,  which  promise  to  increase  oflBce  production  from  25 
to  300  per  cent.  Gadgets  can  add,  subtract,  multiply,  divide  and 
duplicate— all  at  once;  can  type  in  51  languages,  open  and  seal 
envelopes,  stamp  and  address  them.  There  is  a  billing  machine 
that  takes  raw  paper  in  at  one  end,  cuts  it  to  size,  perforates  it, 
prints  two-color  forms  on  it,  prints  the  amounts  of  the  bills, 
addresses  them,  and  neatly  piles  them  up  for  the  postman.  There 
is  a  television  set-up  through  which  a  man  can  flick  a  switch  and 
observe  a  worker  in  any  part  of  his  office  or  plant.  There  is  an 
incredibly  dextrous  machine  into  which  cards  are  slipped,  which 
sends  out  tailor-made  replies  to  every  imaginable  complaint  and 
inquiry. 

Most  startling  perhaps  are  the  new  electronic  calculators, 
which  store  up  one  thousand  units  of  information  on  a  quarter 
of  an  inch  of  magnetic  tape.  In  one  insurance  company,  such 
machines  'take  in  the  data  in  regard  to  a  policy  being  surren- 
dered, look  up  the  cash  value,  interpolate  for  the  premium  paid 
to  date,  multiply  by  the  amount  of  insurance,  total  any  loans, 
compute  the  interest  on  each  loan  and  total  that,  credit  the  value 
of  any  dividend  accumulations  and  any  premiums  paid  in  ad- 
vance, and  type  out  the  check  in  payment  of  the  net  value  of  the 
policy.' 

Of  course,  such  machines  are  practical  only  in  big  offices.  But 
there  are  incredible  savings  in  time  and  cost  and  accuracy  from 
even  simple,  inexpensive  gadgets:  for  example,  a  speed-feed  for 
a  single  typewriter  which  inserts  and  removes  carbons  automati- 
cally—by hand,  25  bills  an  hour;  by  speed-feed,  75  an  hour.  A 
table  especially  constructed  for  opening  letters  increases  output 
some  30  per  cent.  With  a  standard  typewriter  one  girl  can  turn 
out  600  premium-due  notices  a  day;  with  electric  typewriters 
and  continuous  forms,  the  same  girl  can  do  700.  Dictating  ma- 
chines can  cut  a  secretary's  letter  time  in  half.  The  small  busi- 
nessman can  also  draw  upon  one  of  the  80  IBM  service  stations 
throughout  the  nation,  which  will  handle  his  whole  payroll  by 
machine  on  punch  cards. 

The  industrial  revolution  now  comes  to  the  office  much  faster 
than  it  did  to  the  factory,  for  it  has  been  able  to  draw  upon  the 
factory  as  a  model.  The  very  size  of  U.S.  industry  has  brought 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  195 

an  incredible  increase  in  paper  work,  and  the  enlargement  and 
complication  of  the  U.S.  office.  Machines  in  the  office  were 
needed  to  keep  up  with  the  effects  and  management  of  machines 
in  the  plant.  The  sweep  of  increased  corporation  mergers,  espe- 
cially in  the  'twenties,  further  enlarged  the  unit  of  the  business 
structure  and  entailed  more  extensive  co-ordination.  Then  the 
government  demanded  more  business  records:  in  the  First  World 
War,  national  income  taxes  were  instituted;  the  New  Deal 
brought  the  volume  of  paper  work  to  new  heights  by  social  secu- 
rity, wage-hour  laws,  deductions  of  taxes,  et  cetera,  from  pay- 
rolls; the  Second  World  War  not  only  added  to  the  paper  burden 
but,  as  the  labor  market  tightened,  made  it  more  difficult  to  get 
college-level  people  to  do  cabinet  filing  jobs.  The  income  of  office 
workers  rose  also;  trade  unions  threatened  continuously,  and 
office  productivity  was  considered  low.  The  answer  was  clear: 
machinery  in  the  office. 

Yet  we  are  still  only  in  the  beginning  of  the  office-machine 
age.  Only  when  the  machinery  and  the  social  organization  of  the 
office  are  fully  integrated  in  terms  of  maximum  efficiency  per 
dollar  spent  will  that  age  be  full  blown.  Today,  the  machine  in- 
vestment per  industrial  worker  varies  from  $19,375  in  the  chemi- 
cal industry  to  $2,659  in  textiles;  the  average  per  office  worker 
is  not  more  than  $1000. 

III.  As  machines  spread,  they  began  to  prompt  newer  divisions 
of  labor  to  add  to  those  they  had  originally  merely  implemented. 
The  new  machines,  especially  the  more  complex  and  costly  ones, 
require  central  control  of  offices  previously  scattered  throughout 
the  enterprise.  This  centralization,  which  prompts  more  new 
divisions  of  labor,  is  again  facilitated  by  each  new  depression, 
through  the  urge  to  cut  costs,  and  each  new  war,  through  the 
increased  volume  of  office  work.  The  present  extent  of  office 
centralization  has  not  been  precisely  measured,  although  the 
tendency  has  been  clear  enough  since  the  early  'twenties:  by  then 
machines  and  social  organizations  had  begun  to  interact,  and 
that  is  the  true  mark  of  the  'era  of  scientffic  management  in  the 
office.'  That  era  is  still  in  its  late  infancy,  but  it  is  clearly  the 
model  of  the  future. 


196  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

Neither  machmes  nor  other  factory-type  techniques  could  be 
efficiently  applied  until  'small  groups  of  uncontrolled  stenog- 
raphers throughout  the  office'  were  brought  into  'one  central 
stenographic  section.'  Detached  office  units,  often  duplicating 
one  another's  work,  must  be  drawn  into  a  central  office.  New 
work  and  job  routines  are  invented  in  order  to  get  maximum  use 
from  the  costly  machines.  Like  manufacturing  equipment,  they 
are  not  to  remain  idle  if  it  can  possibly  be  avoided.  Therefore, 
the  work  the  machines  do  must  be  centralized  into  one  pool. 

Machines  and  centralization  go  together  in  company  after 
company:  and  together  they  increase  output  and  lower  unit  costs. 
They  also  open  the  way  to  the  full  range  of  factory  organization 
and  techniques:  work  can  be  simplffied  and  specialized;  work 
standards  for  each  operation  can  be  set  up  and  applied  to  indi- 
vidual workers.  'We  believe  firmly,'  says  one  office  manager,  'in 
getting  a  proper  record  of  individual  production  in  order  .  .  . 
[to]  determine  a  definite  cost  unit  of  work.  .  .'  By  'measuring  the 
work  of  individual  employees  .  .  .  we  have  a  firm  basis  on 
which  ...  to  effect  economy  of  operation.' 

Any  work  that  is  measurable  can  be  standardized,  and  often 
broken  down  into  simple  operations.  Then  it  can  proceed  at  a 
standard  pace,  which  'scientffic  investigation  has  determined  can 
be  performed  by  a  first  class  worker  in  a  stated  time.'  The  very 
computation  of  such  standards  prompts  new  splitting  of  more 
complex  tasks  and  increased  specialization.  For  specialization 
and  control  from  the  top,  along  with  standards,  interact.  When 
a  gauge  can  be  provided  for  the  abilities  of  each  person,  the 
establishment  of  standards  gives  the  office  a  new,  more  even 
tempo. 

Time  and  motion  studies  are,  of  course,  well  known  in  many 
insurance  companies  and  banks.  In  the  'twenties,  some  16  per 
cent  of  one  group  of  companies,  and  in  1942,  some  28  per  cent, 
were  making  time  and  motion  measurements.  One  company,  for 
example,  which  sets  its  standards  this  way,  decreased  its  person- 
nel by  one-third;  another  decreased  its  personnel  39  per  cent, 
while  increasing  its  volume  of  work  40  per  cent. 

Cost  reduction  proceeds  by  eliminating  some  work  and  sim- 
plifying the  rest.  To  do  this,  a  functional  breakdown  of  job  opera- 
tions is  made,  and  a  functional  breakdown  of  human  abilities; 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  197 

then  the  two  breakdowns  are  mated  in  a  new,  simplified  set  of 
routinized  tasks.  Along  with  this,  machines  are  introduced  for 
all  possible  features  of  the  work  process  that  cost  factors  allow. 
Then  the  effects  of  these  factory-like  procedures  upon  the  office 
workers  are  rationalized  and  compulsory  rest  periods  set  up 
to  relieve  fatigue. 

The  process  is  extended  even  to  the  worker's  life  before  he 
enters  the  office.  Crack  oflBce  men  have  known  for  some  time 
that  training  for  rationalization  must  start  in  the  schools:  'The 
oflBce  manager  should  contact  local  schools,  explain  his  require- 
ments and  solicit  school  aid  in  training  students  of  commercial 
subjects  to  meet  office  requirements.  School  courses  can  easily  be 
designed  to  qualify  graduates  for  the  work  requirements  in  our 
offices.' 

Even  the  physical  layout  and  appearance  of  the  office  become 
more  factory-like.  Office  architecture  and  layout  move  toward 
two  goals:  the  abolition  of  private  offices  and  the  arrange- 
ment of  a  straight-line  flow  of  work.  One  office  moved  to  new 
quarters  where  200  former  private  offices  were  reduced  to  17. 
This  shift  provided  more  light  and  better  supervision.  'People 
really  do  keep  busier  when  the  officer  in  charge  can  look  at  them 
occasionally.'  In  this  same  office,  'the  various  activities  have  been 
placed  to  facilitate  the  flow  of  work.  Work  flows  vertically  from 
one  floor  to  another,  as  well  as  horizontally  on  the  same  floor. 
That  departments  may  be  near  each  other  vertically  is  usually 
taken  into  consideration  when  planning  factories;  this  vertical 
"nearness"  is  not  always  considered  in  planning  clerical  working 
quarters.'  Merely  re-shuffling  the  desk  plan  can  effect  a  saving 
of  15  per  cent  in  standard  hour  units. 

The  next  step  is  clear:  a  moving  'belt'  replaces  desks.  As  early 
as  1929,  Grace  Coyle  observed  in  one  large  firm:  'orders  are 
passed  along  by  means  of  a  belt  and  lights  from  a  chief  clerk  to 
a  series  of  checkers  and  typists,  each  of  whom  does  one  opera- 
tion. The  girl  at  the  head  of  the  line  interprets  the  order,  puts 
down  the  number  and  indicates  the  trade  discount;  the  second 
girl  prices  the  order,  takes  off  the  discount,  adds  carriage 
charges  and  totals;  the  third  girl  gives  the  order  a  number  and 
makes  a  daily  record;  the  fourth  girl  puts  this  information  on  an 
alphabetical  index;  the  fifth  girl  time-stamps  it:  it  next  goes  along 


198  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

the  belt  to  one  of  several  typists,  who  makes  a  copy  in  sextuplicate 
and  puts  on  address  labels;  the  seventh  girl  checks  it  and  sends 
it  to  the  storeroom.' 

Today  one  machine  can  do  what  this  belt-line  of  girls  did 
twenty-five  years  ago.  But  even  with  machines— 'In  any  produc- 
tion process  the  importance  of  good  tools  is  no  greater  than  the 
relationship  that  exists  between  them,'  Albert  H.  Strieker  has 
observed.  'Before  a  production  line  can  attain  maximum  eflFec- 
tiveness,  the  machines  must  be  arranged  to  permit  the  unimpeded 
flow  of  parts  or  products  from  one  end  of  the  line  to  the  other. 
In  their  proper  position  as  the  vital  tools  of  paper- work  produc- 
tion, typewriters  and  calculating  machines,  tabulators  and  book- 
keeping machines,  furniture  and  all  forms  of  office  equipment 
can  be  arranged  and  combined  to  create  an  effective  office-pro- 
duction line.' 

These  techniques  and  ways  of  reasoning  have  been  long  estab- 
lished in  office-management  circles  and  are  identical  with  the 
reasoning  found  in  factory-management  circles.  Their  advance 
in  offices,  however,  is  still  uneven,  being  perhaps,  in  the  first 
instance,  limited  by  the  size  of  the  office.  Only  about  half  of  U.S. 
clerical  workers  in  1930  were  in  offices  of  over  50  workers;  but 
offices  continually  become  larger  and,  as  they  do,  changes  occur: 
personal  telephone  calls,  smoking  during  office  hours,  visits  from 
personal  friends,  and  handling  of  personal  mail  are  restricted, 
while  mechanization  and  social  rationalization— including  rest 
periods,  rest  rooms,  and  hospital  plans— increase. 

3.  The  White-Collar  Girl 

Between  the  still-remaining  old  office  and  the  vanguard,  fully- 
rationalized  office,  there  is  a  widespread,  intermediate  type.  Just 
before  World  War  I,  Sinclair  Lewis  in  The  Job  described  such 
an  office,  which,  although  caricatured,  is  not  untypical: 

At  the  top,  the  chiefs,  department  heads  and  officers  of  the 
company,  'big,  florid,  shaven,  large-chinned  men,  talking  easily 
.  .  .  able  in  a  moment's  conference  at  lunch  to  "shift  the  policy." 
.  .  .  When  they  jovially  entered  the  elevator  together,  some 
high-strung  stenographer  would  rush  over  to  one  of  the  older 
women  to  weep  and  be  comforted.  .  .' 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  199 

Below  them  there  was  'the  caste  of  bright  young  men  who 
would  some  day  have  the  chance  to  be  beatified  into  chiefs,'  who 
looked  loyally  to  the  chiefs,  'worshipped  the  house  policy,'  and 
sat,  'in  silk  shirts  and  new  ties,  at  shiny,  flat-topped  desks  in  rows' 
answering  the  telephone  'with  an  air.' 

Intermingled  with  them  were  the  petty  chiefs,  the  oflBce  man- 
agers and  bookkeepers,  who  were  'velvety'  to  those  above  them, 
but  'twangily  nagging'  to  those  under  them,  'Failures  themselves, 
they  eyed  sourly  the  stenographers  who  desired  two  dollars  more 
a  week,  and  assured  them  that  while,  personally,  they  would  be 
very  glad  to  obtain  the  advance  for  them,  it  would  be  "unfair  to 
the  other  girls." ' 

Somewhat  outside  the  main  hierarchy  was  the  small  corps  of 
private  secretaries,  each  the  'daily  confidante  to  one  of  the  gods.' 
Nevertheless,  these  confidantes  were  not  able  'to  associate'  with 
the  gods,  or  'he  friendly,  in  coat-room  or  rest-room  or  elevator, 
with  the  unrecognized  horde  of  girls  who  merely  copied  or  took 
the  bright  young  men's  dictation.' 

These  girls  of  the  common  herd  were  expected  to  call  the  sec- 
retaries "Miss,"  no  matter  what  street  corner  impertinences  they 
used  to  one  another.'  Factional  rivalry  split  them.  'They  were 
expected  to  keep  clean  and  be  quick-moving;  beyond  that  they 
were  as  unimportant  to  the  larger  phases  of  office  politics  as  frogs 
to  a  summer  hotel.  Only  the  cashier's  card  index  could  remem- 
ber their  names.'  Their  several  types  included  'the  white-haired, 
fair-handed  women  of  fifty  and  sixty  .  .  .  spinsters  and  widows, 
for  whom  life  was  nothing  but  a  desk  and  a  job  of  petty  pickings 
—mailing  circulars  or  assorting  letters  or  checking  up  lists.'  And 
also,  'the  girls  of  twenty-two  getting  tired,  the  women  of  twenty- 
eight  getting  dried  and  stringy,  the  women  of  thirty-five  in  a  solid 
maturity  of  large-bosomed  and  widowed  spinster-hood,  the  old 
women  purring  and  catty  and  tragic.  .  .' 

It  is  from  this  kind  of  office,  rather  than  the  dusty,  midget 
office  of  old  or  the  new  factory-like  lay-out,  that  the  common 
stereotypes  of  the  office  world  and  its  inhabitants,  particularly 
the  white-collar  girl,  are  drawn.  Probably  the  major  image  is 
that  the  office  is  full  of  women.  Of  course,  American  women  work 
elsewhere;  they  have  had  two  generations  of  experience  in  fac- 


200  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

tories  and  in  service  industries.  But  this  experience  has  not  been 
so  generahzed  and  diflFused,  except  briefly  during  wars,  as  has 
the  experience  of  the  white-collar  girl. 

It  is  as  a  secretary  or  clerk,  a  business  woman  or  career  girl, 
that  the  white-collar  girl  dominates  our  idea  of  the  office.  She  is 
the  office,  write  the  editors  of  Fortune:  'The  male  is  the  name  on 
the  door,  the  hat  on  the  coat  rack,  and  the  smoke  in  the  corner 
room.  But  the  male  is  not  the  office.  The  office  is  the  competent 
woman  at  the  other  end  of  his  buzzer,  the  two  young  ladies 
chanting  his  name  monotonously  into  the  mouthpieces  of  a  kind 
of  gutta-percha  halter,  the  four  girls  in  the  glass  coop  pecking 
out  his  initials  with  pink  fingernails  on  the  keyboards  of  four 
voluble  machines,  the  half  dozen  assorted  skirts  whisking  through 
the  filing  cases  of  his  correspondence,  and  the  elegant  miss  in  the 
reception  room  recognizing  his  friends  and  disposing  of  his  antip- 
athies with  the  pleased  voice  and  impersonal  eye  of  a  presidential 
consort.' 

Novels  about  white-collar  girls,  appearing  mainly  in  the  'twen- 
ties, were  very  popular.  Kitty  Foyle's  time  is  from  1911  through 
the  middle  'thirties;  Minnie  Hutzler,  another  Morley  character 
in  Human  Beings,  is  followed  from  1889  to  1929;  the  story  of 
Janey  Williams  of  Dos  Passos'  USA  runs  from  1900  to  1920;  Tark- 
ington's  Alice  Adams  and  Sinclair  Lewis's  Una  Golden  lived  be- 
fore World  War  I.  Ten  years  on  either  side  of  the  First  World 
War— that  was  the  time  of  the  greatest  literary  interest  in  the 
white-collar  girl.  The  images  are  tied  to  the  scenes  of  that  period 
of  white-collar  work,  and  many  of  the  images  presented  are 
strikingly  similar. 

Sinclair  Lewis's  Una  Golden,  Booth  Tarkington's  Alice  Adams, 
and  Christopher  Morley 's  Kitty  Foyle— each  was  thrown  into 
white-collar  work  after  the  death  or  failure  of  her  father  and  in 
each  case  the  father  was  an  old  middle-class  man  who  had  not 
been  doing  well. 

The  small-town  Goldens  were  'too  respectable  to  permit  her 
to  have  a  job,  and  too  poor  to  permit  her  to  go  to  college.'  Her 
father,  'a  petty  small  town'  lawyer,  died  when  she  was  24,  and 
she  and  her  mother  were  left  with  no  inheritance.  They  began 
to  enact  the  standard  pattern  of  widowed  mother,  'pawing  at 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  201 

culture,'  and  the  unemployed  daughter.  For  such  mother-daugh- 
ter teams  there  were  three  small-town  possibilities:  'If  they  were 
wealthy,  daughter  collected  rents  and  saw  lawyers  and  belonged 
to  a  club  and  tried  to  keep  youthful  at  parties.  If  middle  class, 
daughter  taught  school,  almost  invariably.  If  poor,  mother  did 
the  washing  and  daughter  collected  it.  So  it  was  marked  down 
for  Una  that  she  would  be  a  teacher.'  But  she  didn't  want  to 
teach;  the  only  other  job  available  was  in  a  dry-goods  store, 
which  would  have  meant  loss  of  caste;  and  all  the  energetic 
young  men  had  gone  to  the  big  cities;  so  she  gambled  and  went 
with  her  mother  to  New  York,  where  she  attended  a  'college  of 
commerce'  and  became  an  'office  woman.' 

The  story  of  Alice  Adams— sociologically  the  most  acute  of 
these  novels— is  a  story  of  aspirations  being  whittled  down  to 
white-collar  size.  It  opens  with  Alice  going  to  a  party  at  the 
home  of  an  upper-class  family;  it  ends  with  her  climbing  the 
darkened  stairway  of  a  business  college,  like  a  girl  taking  the 
nun's  veil,  after  frustration  in  love  and  social  aspiration.  Through- 
out the  book,  lurking  in  the  background  like  a  slum  by  a  gold 
coast,  the  'begrimed  stairway'  of  the  business  college  is  seen  by 
Alice,  with  'a  glance  of  vague  misgiving,'  as  a  road  to  'hideous 
obscurity.'  When  Alice  thinks  of  it,  she  thinks  of  'pretty  girls  turn- 
ing into  withered  creatures  as  they  worked  at  typing  machines'; 
old  maids  'taking  dictation'  from  men  with  double  chins,  a  dozen 
different  kinds  of  old  maids  'taking  dictation.'  The  office  is  a 
production  plant  for  old  maids,  a  modern  nunnery.  The  contrast 
is  between  the  business  college  and  the  glamorous  stage,  or  the 
profitable,  early,  lovely  marriage. 

Yet  the  business  college  has  'an  unpleasant  fascination  for  her, 
and  a  mysterious  reproach,  which  she  did  not  seek  to  fathom.' 
At  the  end,  her  ascent  of  the  begrimed  stairway  is  'the  end  of 
youth  and  the  end  of  hope.'  When  she  goes  to  the  business  col- 
lege, she  does  not  wear  any  'color'  (rouge)  even  though  her  am- 
bitious mother,  not  knowing  where  she  is  going,  tells  her  to  get 
up  gay  when  she  goes  out. 

Alice  Adams  is  a  novel  of  Alice's  father's  occupational  fate 
as  well  as  of  Alice's.  The  father  is  the  head  of  the  'sundries  de- 
partment' of  a  wholesale  drug  house;  he  displays  an  intense  loy- 
alty to  the  firm  and  the  man  who  owns  and  runs  it.  But  the  little 


202  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

motor  of  his  wife's  ambition  drives  him  to  quit  the  salaried  em- 
ployee's meager  dole  and  go  on  the  market  with  a  business  of  his 
own.  He  fails.  Both  Alice  and  her  father  finally  face  modern 
realities;  at  the  end,  the  father  moves  from  clerk  to  entrepreneur- 
failure  to  'the  landlady's  husband  around  a  boarding-house'; 
Alice  becomes  the  white-collar  girl. 

In  American  folklore,  the  white-collar  girl  is  usually  born  of 
small-town  lower  middle-class  parents.  High  school  plays  an 
important  part  in  the  creation  of  her  rather  tense  personality. 
She  may  take  a  commercial  coirrse  in  high  school,  and  possibly 
a  year  or  two  of  business  college.  Upon  graduation,  being  smart 
and  pretty,  she  gets  a  job  in  her  own  town.  But  she  yearns  for 
independence  from  family  and  other  local  ties;  she  wants  to  go 
to  the  big  city,  most  of  all.  New  York.  She  leaves  home,  and  the 
family  becomes  of  secondary  importance,  for  it  represents  a 
status  restriction  on  independence.  Going  home  to  see  the  folks 
is  a  reluctantly  done  chore,  and  she  can't  wait  to  get  back  to 
the  big  city.  To  get  started  in  New  York  she  may  even  borrow 
money  from  a  bank,  rather  than  ask  her  parents  for  it. 

The  white-collar  girl  in  the  big  city  often  looks  back  on  her 
high-school  period  in  the  small  town  as  the  dress  rehearsal  for 
something  that  never  came  off.  The  personal  clique  of  the  high 
school  is  not  replaced  by  the  impersonal  unity  of  the  office;  the 
adolescent  status  equality  is  not  replaced  by  the  hierarchy  of  the 
city;  the  close-up  thrill  of  the  high-school  date  is  not  replaced 
by  the  vicarious  distances  of  the  darkened  movie;  the  high- 
school  camaraderie  of  anticipations  is  not  fulfilled  by  the  realiza- 
tion of  life-fate  in  the  white-collar  world. 

The  white-collar  girl  has  a  close  friend,  sometimes  from  the 
same  home  town,  and  usually  a  girl  more  experienced  in  the  big 
city.  They  commonly  share  an  apartment,  a  wardrobe  and  a 
budget,  their  dates  and  their  troubles.  The  close  friend  is  an 
essential  psychological  need  in  the  big  city,  and  the  white-collar 
girl's  only  salvation  from  loneliness  and  boredom. 

The  first  job  is  a  continuation  of  her  education  as  a  stenog- 
rapher or  typist.  Her  pay  check  is  small,  but  she  does  learn 
oflBce  routine  with  its  clean,  brisk,  new,  eflBcient  bustle.  She  also 
learns  how  to  handle  the  male  element  in  the  office,  begins  to 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  203 

believe  that  all  men  are  after  only  one  thing.  She  laughs  about 
small,  funny  incidents  with  the  other  girls,  especially  last  night's 
date  and  tonight's.  She  is  given  her  first  cocktail  by  a  salesman 
who  is  an  expert  on  the  psychology  of  girl  stenographers. 

The  first  job  is  usually  the  toughest,  and  she  goes  through  sev- 
eral jobs  before  she  gets  the  one  she  settles  down  in,  if  she  can 
be  said  to  settle  down.  In  between  jobs,  of  course,  she  has  the 
most  difficult  time.  The  office  is  at  first  not  a  pleasant  place,  but 
she  gets  to  know  it  and  can  soon  classify  all  its  people.  There  is 
the  boss  in  the  front,  whose  private  secretary  she  hopes  some 
day  to  become.  There  are  minor  executives  and  salesmen,  who 
are  eligible  for  marriage  or  dates  or  at  least  good  for  dinners. 
'When  you're  working  on  $18-a-week  like  those  kids  you  don't 
go  out  evenings  unless  someone  takes  you.  You  sit  home  with 
a  lemon  coke  and  wash  stockings  and  iron  a  slip  and  buy  the 
evening  papers  in  turns  and  set  the  alarm  clock  so  there'll  be 
time  to  walk  to  work  in  the  morning.'  Finally  there  is  the  old  man 
who  is  either  a  clerk  or  an  accountant,  and  there  are  the  'fresh' 
office  boys. 

The  love  story  of  the  white-collar  girl  often  involves  frustrat- 
ing experiences  with  some  boy-friend.  For  Kitty  Foyle,  there 
was  Wyn;  for  Minnie,  there  was  Richard  Roe;  for  Janey,  there 
was  Jerry.  When  the  white-collar  girl  does  not  get  her  man,  the 
experience  hardens  her,  turns  her  from  the  simple,  small-town 
girl  to  the  cool,  polished,  and  urbane  career  woman  or  bachelor 
girl.  She  has  no  objection  to  love  affairs  'if  she  cares  enough' 
about  the  fellow,  but  she  cannot  get  over  her  interest  in  marriage. 

After  her  first  frustrating  experience,  however,  love  becomes 
secondary  to  her  career.  For  she  has  begun  to  enjoy  her  position 
and  is  promoted;  after  the  first  level  stretch  she  is  always  on  the 
slight  upgrade.  As  she  becomes  a  successful  career  woman,  her 
idea  of  getting  an  upper-class  man  increases,  and  she  is  'too 
mature  to  interest  the  average  male  of  her  acquaintance.'  Usually 
she  prefers  men  who  are  older  than  she.  After  30,  she  looks  back, 
somewhat  maternally,  upon  the  casual  \ovb  life  of  the  happy-go- 
lucky  younger  girls.  Now  she  is  the  mature  woman,  efficient  in 
her  job,  suppressing  her  love  for  her  married  boss,  to  whom  she 
makes  herself  indispensable,  doing  the  housework  of  his  busi- 
ness. This  relieves  the  impersonal  business  atmosphere  and  the 


204  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

tension  between  superior  and  employee,  but  it  is  also  complicated 
by  the  tact  that  she  may  feel  threatened  by  the  eroticism  of 
younger  women. 

Between  the  first  two  wars  she  talks  like  this:  'Molly  and  me 
had  a  talk  one  time  about  the  white-collar  woman— there's  mil- 
lions of  them,  getting  maybe  15  to  30  a  week— they've  got  to 
dress  themselves  right  up  to  the  hilt,  naturally  they  have  a  yen 
for  social  pleasure,  need  to  be  a  complete  woman  with  all 
woman's  satisfaction  and  they  need  a  chance  to  be  creating  and 
doing.  And  the  men  their  own  age  can't  do  much  for  them,  also 
the  girls  grow  up  too  damn  fast  because  they  absorb  the  point 
of  view  of  older  people  they  work  for.  Their  own  private  life  gets 
to  be  a  rat-race.  Jesusgod,  I  read  about  the  guts  of  the  pioneer 
woman  and  the  woman  of  the  dust  bowl  and  the  gingham  god- 
dess of  the  covered  wagon.  What  about  the  woman  of  the  cov- 
ered typewriter!  What  has  she  got,  poor  kid,  when  she  leaves  the 
office.  .  .  Do  you  know  what  we  are?  We're  sharecroppers.  We 
work  like  nigger  hands  in  a  cotton  field  and  give  Palmer's  more 
brainwork  than  they  know  what  to  do  with,  what  do  we  get  for 
it?  Eight  hours'  sleep,  I  guess,  because  that's  about  all  we're 
fit  for.  .  .  I  guess  nobody  minds  so  much  being  a  sharecropper 
if  he's  damn  sure  that  the  crop's  worth  raising.  But  it  must  be  nice 
to  feel  some  of  that  ground  you  sweat  belongs  to  yourself.' 

In  time  she  yearns  for  a  family  future,  but  settles  down  for 
longer  stretches  into  the  loveless  routine  of  the  office.  Somehow 
it  sustains  her.  Minnie,  in  fact,  is  against  the  institution  of  mar- 
riage; Kitty  has  an  abortion  in  order  that  a  child  will  not  inter- 
fere with  her  position.  Career  has  been  substituted  for  marriage; 
the  conflict  of  the  white-collar  girl  is  resolved;  she  has  climbed 
the  stairway;  she  is  in  the  nunnery. 

4.  The  New  Office 

The  modern  office  with  its  tens  of  thousands  of  square  feet  and 
its  factory-like  flow  of  work  is  not  an  informal,  friendly  place. 
The  drag  and  beat  of  work,  the  'production  unit'  tempo,  require 
that  time  consumed  by  anything  but  business  at  hand  be  ex- 
plained and  apologized  for.  Dictation  was  once  a  private  meet- 
ing of  executive  and  secretary.  Now  the  executive  phones  a  pool 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  205 

of  dictaphone  transcribers  whom  he  never  sees  and  who  know 
him  merely  as  a  voice.  Many  old  types  of  personnel  have  become 
machine  operators,  many  new  types  began  as  machine  operators. 

I.  The  rise  of  the  office  manager,  from  a  'chief  clerk'  to  a  re- 
sponsible executive  reporting  directly  to  the  company  treasurer 
or  vice  president,  is  an  obvious  index  to  the  enlargement  of 
offices  and  to  the  rise  of  the  office  as  a  centralized  service  divi- 
sion of  the  entire  enterprise.  It  is  under  him  that  the  factory-like 
office  has  been  developing.  Specializing  as  he  does  in  the  rational 
and  efficient  design  and  service  of  office  functions,  the  office 
manager  can  obviously  do  a  better  job  than  a  detached  minor 
supervisor. 

The  office  manager  had  begun  to  appear  in  the  larger  com- 
panies by  the  late  'twenties.  Many  early  office  managers  were 
'detail  men'  holding  other  positions,  perhaps  in  the  accounting 
department,  but  at  the  same  time  Tiandling'  the  office  force.  But 
as  the  office  increased  in  importance  and  in  costs,  it  grew  into  an 
autonomous  unit  and  the  office  manager  grew  with  it.  He  had  to 
know  the  clerical  work  and  the  routing  of  all  departments;  he 
had  to  be  able  to  design  and  to  adapt  to  new  administrative 
schemes  and  set-ups;  he  had  to  train  new  employees  and  re-train 
old  ones.  The  all-company  scope  of  his  domain  gave  room  for 
his  knowledge  and  prestige  to  increase,  or  at  least  his  claims  for 
prestige  vis  a  vis  'other  department  heads.'  By  1929,  about  one- 
third  of  one  large  group  of  office  managers  came  from  non- 
office  executive  positions,  whereas  half  worked  up  through  the 
office,  and  some  17  per  cent  came  up  through  other  offices,  so 
that  one  may  assume  the  position  already  had  a  recognized  status, 

II.  As  office  machinery  is  introduced,  the  number  of  routine 
jobs  is  increased,  and  consequently  the  proportion  of  'positions 
requiring  initiative'  is  decreased.  'Mechanization  is  resulting  in 
a  much  clearer  distinction  between  the  managing  staflF  and  the 
operating  staff,'  observed  the  War  Manpower  Commission.  'Fin- 
ger dexterity  is  often  more  important  than  creative  thinking.  Pro- 
motions consequently  become  relatively  rare.  .  .  Some  large 
office  managers  actually  prefer  to  hire  girls  who  are  content  to 


206  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

remain  simply  clerks,  who  will  attempt  to  rise  no  higher  than 
their  initial  level.' 

As  we  compare  the  personnel  of  the  new  office  with  that  of 
the  old,  it  is  the  mass  of  clerical  machine-operatives  that  immedi- 
ately strikes  us.  They  are  the  most  factory-like  operatives  in  the 
white-collar  worlds.  The  period  of  time  required  to  learn  their 
skills  seems  steadily  to  decline;  it  must,  in  fact,  if  the  expense 
of  introducing  machines  and  new  standardized  specializations 
is  to  be  justified.  For  the  key  advantages  of  most  mechanical  and 
centralizing  office  devices  are  that,  while  they  permit  greater 
speed  and  accuracy,  they  also  require  cheaper  labor  per  unit, 
less  training,  simpler  specialization,  and  thus  replaceable  em- 
ployees. 

These  interchangeable  clerks  often  punch  a  time  clock,  are  not 
allowed  to  talk  during  working  hours,  and  have  no  tenure  of 
employment  beyond  a  week  or  sometimes  a  month.  They  typi- 
cally have  no  contact  with  supervisors  except  in  the  course  of 
being  supervised.  In  large  ofiices  these  people  are  the  major 
links  in  the  system,  but  in  their  minds  and  in  those  of  their  man- 
agers, there  is  rarely  any  serious  thought  of  learning  the  whole 
system  and  rising  within  it.  Even  in  the  middle  'twenties  88  per 
cent  of  the  office  managers  questioned  in  one  survey  indicated 
that  they  definitely  needed  people  'who  give  little  promise  of 
rising  to  an  executive  status,'  and  60  per  cent  stated  that  there 
was  Very  little  opportunity'  in  their  offices  to  learn,  and  hence 
rise,  by  apprenticeship. 

The  rationalization  of  the  office,  on  the  one  hand,  attracts  and 
creates  a  new  mass  of  clerks  and  machine  operators,  and  their 
work  increasingly  approximates  the  factory  operative  in  light 
manufacturing.  On  the  other  hand,  this  new  office  requires  the 
office  manager,  a  specialized  manager  who  operates  the  human 
machinery. 

III.  The  bookkeeper  has  been  grievously  affected  by  the  last 
half  century  of  office  change:  his  old  central  position  is  usurped 
by  the  office  manager,  and  even  the  most  experienced  bookkeeper 
with  pen  and  ink  cannot  compete  with  a  high-school  girl  trained 
in  three  or  four  months  to  use  a  machine.  It  is  like  a  pick  and 
shovel  against  a  power  scoop. 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  207 

The  bookkeeping  or  billing  machine  posts^  enters,  totals,  and 
balances;  from  the  accumulated  postings  control  accounts  are 
made  up.  And  such  a  machine  is  a  simple  sort  of  apparatus, 
although  it  is  still  second  only  to  the  typewriter  in  oflBces  today. 
Other  new  machines  displace  ten  of  the  old,  and  their  operatives, 
at  one  stroke.  Just  as  the  high-school  girl  with  her  machine  has 
displaced  the  pen-and-ink  bookkeeper,  so  the  big  new  machines 
promise,  in  due  course,  to  displace  the  high-school  girl.  At  the 
top  of  the  new  'bookkeeping'  world  are  the  professional  account- 
ants and  electronic  technicians.  But  their  predominance  on  any 
practical  scale  is  still  largely  to  come.  In  the  meantime,  the 
stratum  of  older  bookkeepers  is  demoted  to  the  level  of  the 
clerical  mass. 

'When  recruiting  new  employees  for  this  operation,'  says  the 
manager  of  a  bookkeeping  operation  in  a  large  company,  'we 
seek  girls  about  seventeen  years  minimum  age,  at  least  two 
years'  high  school  or  its  equivalent,  with  no  previous  business 
experience  and  good  personal  qualifications.  We  prefer  inexperi- 
enced girls  and  those  who  have  some  economic  incentive  to  work 
as  we  have  found  they  make  the  steadiest  workers;  so  we  select 
from  our  recruits  what  we  classify  as  the  semi-dependent  or 
wholly  dependent  applicant.  .  .' 

IV.  The  secretary  has  been  the  model  of  aspiration  for  most 
oflBce  girls.  The  typewriter  has,  of  course,  been  the  woman's 
machine,  and  in  itself  it  has  not  led  to  factory-like  efi^ects.  In 
and  out  of  the  oflBce  world,  it  has  been  a  highly  respectable  ma- 
chine. Its  operator,  equipped  with  stenographer's  pad,  has  man- 
aged to  borrow  prestige  from  her  close  and  private  contact  with 
the  executive. 

The  standard  girl-hierarchy  in  ofiBces  has  been  formed  around 
the  typewriter  in  the  following  way:  (1)  The  private  secretary, 
as  someone's  confidential  assistant,  in  many  cases  can  actually 
act  for  him  on  many  not  always  routine  matters.  She  takes  care 
of  his  appointments,  his  daily  schedule,  his  check  book— is,  in 
short,  justifiably  called  his  office  wife.  If  her  boss's  office  warrants 
it,  she  may  even  have  stenographers  and  typists  working  for  her. 
(2)  The  stenographer  is  a  typist  who  also  takes  dictation.  (3) 
The  typist  works  only  with  the  machine;  because  her  work  is  a 


208  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

straight  copying  matter,  her  most  important  traits  are  speed  and 
accuracy  at  the  keyboard.  Unlike  the  secretary,  and  to  a  lesser 
extent  the  stenographer,  she  is  usually  closely  supervised. 

In  the  new,  rationalized  office,  this  hierarchy— graded  in  in- 
come, skill,  degree  of  supervision,  and  access  to  important  per- 
sons—has begun  to  break  down.  There  is  now  a  strong  tendency 
to  limit  the  number  of  secretaries;  many  $15,000-a-year  execu- 
tives do  not  have  private  secretaries  and  never  see  a  shorthand 
stenographer.  Instead  they  dictate  to  a  machine,  whose  cylinders 
go  to  a  pool  of  typists.  Although  this  pooling  of  stenographic 
services  took  place  in  many  big  offices  before  dictaphone  equip- 
ment was  installed,  usually  the  two  went  together.  Systematic 
studies  clearly  revealed  the  wastefulness  of  individually  assigned 
stenographers,  the  alternate  periods  of  slack  and  of  frenzy  rather 
than  a  smooth  and  efficient  flow. 

Since  its  beginnings  in  the  'twenties,  the  centralization  of  the 
stenographic  operation  has  spread  continuously,  being  limited 
only  by  size  of  office  and  inertia.  The  trend  is  for  only  the  senior 
executives  to  have  private  secretaries  and  for  both  stenographers 
and  typists  to  become  pooled  as  transcribing  typists.  In  one  large 
insurance  company's  home  office  less  than  2  per  cent  of  the  em- 
ployees are  assigned  as  secretaries  to  persons  above  the  rank 
of  Division  Manager.  The  junior  executive  has  his  stenographer 
on  his  desk  in  a  metal  box,  or  may  even  dictate  directly  to  the 
transcribing  pool  via  inter-office  telephone. 

The  centralized  transcribing  pool  has  further  advantages:  for 
the  'poor  dictator,'  the  machines  allow  adjustments  in  audibility; 
they  eliminate  over-time  imposed  by  late  afternoon  dictation, 
and  also  the  strain  of  reading  hurriedly  written  notes.  'They  hear 
it  automatically  and  have  only  to  punch  the  keys  to  get  the  re- 
sults,' the  managerial  literature  states.  'Girls  with  speed  and 
accuracy'  are  what  are  wanted  in  the  new  office. 

The  skill  of  shorthand  becomes  obsolete;  the  white-collar  girl 
becomes  almost  immediately  replaceable;  work  in  offices  be- 
comes increasingly  a  blind-alley.  The  new  white-collar  girl  cannot 
know  intimately  some  segment  of  the  office  or  business,  and  has 
lost  the  private  contact  that  gave  status  to  the  secretary  and  even 
the  stenographer.  The  work  is  regulated  so  that  it  can  be  speeded 
up  and  effectively  supervised  by  non-executive  personnel.   In 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  209 

short,  the  prized  white-collar  spot  for  women  is  becoming  more 
and  more  the  job  of  a  factory-like  operative.  By  the  early  'thir- 
ties, Amy  Hewes  was  observing,  'The  shadowy  line  between 
many  .  .  .  clerical  tasks  and  unskilled  factory  occupations  is  be- 
coming more  and  more  imperceptible.' 

The  new  oflBce  is  rationalized:  machines  are  used,  employees 
become  machine  attendants;  the  work,  as  in  the  factory,  is  col- 
lective, not  individualized;  it  is  standardized  for  interchange- 
able, quickly  replaceable  clerks;  it  is  specialized  to  the  point  of 
automatization.  The  employee  group  is  transformed  into  a  uni- 
form mass  in  a  soundless  place,  and  the  day  itself  is  regulated 
by  an  impersonal  time  schedule.  Seeing  the  big  stretch  of  oflBce 
space,  with  rows  of  identical  desks,  one  is  reminded  of  Herman 
Melville's  description  of  a  nineteenth-century  factory:  'At  rows 
of  blank-looking  counters  sat  rows  of  blank-looking  girls,  with 
blank,  white  folders  in  their  blank  hands,  all  blankly  folding 
blank  paper.' 

5.  The  White-Collar  Hierarchy 

The  new  oflBce  at  once  raises  a  hierarchy  and  levels  out  per- 
sonnel. The  hierarchy  is  based  upon  the  power  and  authority 
held  by  the  managerial  cadre,  rather  than  upon  the  levels  of  skill. 
The  individual  employee  is  a  unit  in  an  administrative  hierarchy 
of  authority  and  discipline,  but  he  is  also  equal  before  it  with 
many  other  employees.  Within  this  hierarchy  and  mass,  he  is 
classified  by  the  function  he  performs,  but  sometimes  there  are 
also  'artificial'  distinctions  of  status,  position,  and  above  all  title. 
These  distinctions,  to  which  Carl  Dreyfuss  has  called  attention, 
arise  on  the  one  hand  from  the  employee's  need  to  personalize 
a  little  area  for  himself,  and  on  the  other,  they  may  be  encour- 
aged by  management  to  improve  morale  and  to  discourage  em- 
ployee 'solidarity.' 

In  the  enormous  file,  smaller  hierarchies  fit  into  larger  ones 
and  are  interlinked  in  a  dozen  ways.  There  is  a  formal  line-up 
expressed  by  titles,  and  beneath  these,  further  gradations  in 
status  and  rank.  Rank  does  not  always  correspond  to  skill  or  sal- 
ary level;  in  general,  it  is  expressed  in  the  authority  to  give 


210  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

orders.  The  managerial  cadre,  infiltrating  all  divisions  and  units, 
is  the  backbone  of  the  hierarchy.  Where  one  stands  depends, 
first  upon  the  extent  to  which  one  participates  in  the  cadre's  au- 
thority, and  second,  the  closeness  of  one's  association  with  its 
members.  The  private  secretary  of  the  top  manager  of  a  division 
may  thus  be  superior  in  rank  and  status  to  the  assistant  manager 
of  a  division  further  down.  Educational  level  and  experience 
naturally  lend  status,  but  only  secondarily.  It  is  from  the  mana- 
gerial cadre  that  esteem  is  derived  and  status  borrowed. 

If  the  white-collar  hierarchy  were  purely  bureaucratic  it  would 
be  based  upon  sheer  formal  authority,  as  in  an  army;  but  actu- 
ally, nowhere  are  bureaucratic  principles  of  organization  strictly 
carried  through.  Within  and  between  offices,  there  is  usually  a 
system  of  cliques,  which  often  cut  across  the  formal  line  of  au- 
thority and  work.  Through  them  'the  man  in  the  know'  can  cut 
red  tape,  and  secretaries  of  top  men,  'administrative  assistants' 
as  they  are  called  in  Washington,  can  call  other  secretaries  to 
expedite  matters  that  would  take  much  longer  through  the  regu- 
lar channels. 

Status  inside  the  hierarchy  is  not  always  in  line  with  formal 
participation  in  management;  a  fictitious  closeness  to  authority 
may  bring  prestige.  Private  secretaries,  as  well  as  other  confiden- 
tial assistants  to  managers,  thus  often  stand  out.  Only  in  rare 
cases  do  they  actively  show  or  have  authority,  but  their  position 
requires  close  contact  with  authority  and  they  handle  and  even 
help  to  shape  its  secrets.  By  inner  identification,  they  often  have 
a  strong  illusion  of  authority  and,  by  outward  manner,  impress 
it  on  others.  This  is  by  no  means  discouraged  by  the  managers, 
for  the  gap  between  the  confidential  employee  and  'the  girls'  is 
a  guarantee  of  loyalty,  and  moreover  a  reciprocal  influence  in 
the  increased  prestige  of  the  managers  themselves.  The  scale  of 
available  beauty,  for  instance,  may  influence  the  selection  as  well 
as  class  factors— the  Anglo-Saxon,  upper  middle-class  girl  having 
a  better  chance. 

Those  in  intimate  contact  with  authority  form  a  sort  of  screen 
around  the  persons  who  carry  it,  insuring  its  privacy  and  hence 
heightening  its  prestige.  In  a  great  many  offices  and  stores  today 
the  rank  and  file  never  see  'the  higher  ups,'  but  only  their  im- 
mediate supervisors,  who  are  known  as  'the  boss.'  Grievances 


THE  ENORMOUS  FILE  211 

and  resentments  are  aimed  at  'the  boss';  the  'higher-ups'  come 
within  psychological  view,  if  at  all,  only  in  fantasy:  'If  I  could 
only  get  in  contact  with  them,  I  know  I'd  be  given  my  chance.' 

Titles  and  appurtenances,  which  are  related  in  intricate  ways 
to  formal  authority,  are  outward  and  crucial  signs  of  status.  To 
have  a  telephone  on  one's  desk,  to  use  one  lavatory  or  another, 
to  have  one's  name  on  the  door  or  even  on  a  placard  on  a  desk- 
all  such  items  can  and  do  form  the  content  of  the  employee's 
conscious  striving  and  hope.  A  great  deal  has  been  made  of  such 
distinctions.  Carl  Dreyfuss  alleged  that  they  form  'an  artificial 
hierarchy'  which  is  encouraged  and  exploited  by  the  employer 
who  does  not  wish  solidarity.  When  many  small  gradations  in 
status  exist,  the  employee  can  more  often  experience  the  illusion 
of  'being  somebody'  and  of  ascending  the  scale.  Often  'there  are 
more  rank  than  salary  gradations  but  even  the  latter  exceed  the 
number  of  groupings  actually  required  from  a  technical  point 
of  view.* 

But  such  distinctions,  in  so  far  as  they  are  not  based  on  work 
performed,  fall,  in  time,  before  the  cost-reduction  drives  of  man- 
agement and  the  egalitarian  push  of  trade  unions,  which  strive 
to  classify  jobs  more  systematically.  According  to  this  view,  the 
norm  of  the  'genuine'  hierarchy  is  technical  and  economic,  that 
is,  strictly  bureaucratic;  but  actually  status  elements  are  no  more 
'artificial'  than  technical  and  economic  ones.  Differentiations  do, 
of  course,  develop  on  status  factors  alone,  and  they  are  often  of 
crucial,  even  overpowering  importance  in  white-collar  hier- 
archies. But  the  over-all  trend  is  against  them.  Even  though  em- 
ployers may  try  to  exploit  them  to  discourage  solidarity,  once  a 
union  tries  to  break  the  job  divisions  down  and  then  to  fight  for 
corresponding  income  gradations,  employers  are  usually  ready 
to  level  out  status  differences  in  order  to  lower  costs. 

Only  a  sophisticated  employer  strongly  beleaguered  by  at- 
tempted unionization  might  see  reasons  to  make  conscious  use  of 
prestige  gradations.  It  would  not,  however,  seem  the  most  ra- 
tional choice  he  might  make  and,  in  fact,  the  employer  has  been 
the  leader  of  job  descriptions  and  personnel  work  that  reduce 
the  number  of  complex  functions  and  break  down  the  work  and 
hence  lower  pay.  Machines  implement  and  prompt  such  strict 
technical  and  bureaucratic  gradation.  And  certainly,  even  if  the 


212  WHITE  COLLAR  WORLDS 

artificial  hierarchy  has  been  used  as  a  manner  of  control,  ration- 
alization and  mechanization  are  now  well  on  their  way  to  destroy 
such  schemes. 

Mechanized  and  standardized  work,  the  decline  of  any  chance 
for  the  employee  to  see  and  understand  the  whole  operation,  the 
loss  of  any  chance,  save  for  a  very  few,  for  private  contact  with 
those  in  authority— these  form  the  model  of  the  future.  At  present, 
status  complications  inside  office  and  store  are  still  often  quite 
important  in  the  psychology  of  the  employee;  but,  in  the  main 
drift,  technical  and  economic  factors  and  the  authoritative  line-up 
will  gain  ascendency  over  such  status  factors  as  now  interfere 
with  the  rationalization  of  the  white-collar  hierarchy. 


THREE 

Styles  of  Life 


*My  active  life,  if  I  ever  had  one,  ended 
when  I  was  sixteen,'  says  Mr.  BowHng 
of  George  Orwell's  Coming  Up  for  Air. 
'I  got  the  job  and  ...  the  job  got 
me.  .  .  Everything  that  really  matters 
to  me  had  happened  before  that  date.  .  . 
Well,  they  say  that  happy  people  have 
no  histories,  and  neither  do  the  blokes 
who  work  in  insurance  offices.' 


10 


Work 


Work  may  be  a  mere  source  of  livelihood,  or  the  most  signifi- 
cant part  of  one's  inner  life;  it  may  be  experienced  as  expiation, 
or  as  exuberant  expression  of  self;  as  bounden  duty,  or  as  the 
development  of  man's  universal  nature.  Neither  love  nor  hatred 
of  work  is  inherent  in  man,  or  inherent  in  any  given  line  of  work. 
For  work  has  no  intrinsic  meaning. 

No  adequate  history  of  the  meanings  of  work  has  been  written. 
One  can,  however,  trace  the  influences  of  various  philosophies 
of  work,  which  have  filtered  down  to  modern  workers  and  which 
deeply  modify  their  work  as  well  as  their  leisure. 

While  the  modern  white-collar  worker  has  no  articulate  philos- 
ophy of  work,  his  feelings  about  it  and  his  experiences  of  it  in- 
fluence his  satisfactions  and  frustrations,  the  whole  tone  of  his 
life.  Whatever  the  effects  of  his  work,  known  to  him  or  not,  they 
are  the  net  result  of  the  work  as  an  activity,  plus  the  meanings 
he  brings  to  it,  plus  the  views  that  others  hold  of  it. 

1.  Meanings  of  Work 

To  the  ancient  Greeks,  in  whose  society  mechanical  labor  was 
done  by  slaves,  work  brutalized  the  mind,  made  man  unfit  for 
the  practice  of  virtue.*  It  was  a  necessary  material  evil,  which 
the  elite,  in  their  search  for  changeless  vision,  should  avoid.  The 

*  In  this  historical  sketch  of  philosophies  of  work  I  have  drawn 
upon  Adriano  Tilgher's  Work:  What  It  Has  Meant  to  Men  through 
the  Ages  (New  York:  Harcourt,  Brace,  1930). 

215 


216  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

Hebrews  also  looked  upon  work  as  'painful  drudgery,'  to  which, 
they  added,  man  is  condemned  by  sin.  In  so  far  as  work  atoned 
for  sin,  however,  it  was  worth  while,  yet  Ecclesiastes,  for  ex- 
ample, asserts  that  'The  labor  of  man  does  not  satisfy  the  soul.' 
Later,  Rabbinism  dignified  work  somewhat,  viewing  it  as  worthy 
exercise  rather  than  scourge  of  the  soul,  but  still  said  that  the 
kingdom  to  come  would  be  a  kingdom  of  blessed  idleness. 

In  primitive  Christianity,  work  was  seen  as  punishment  for 
sin  but  also  as  serving  the  ulterior  ends  of  charity,  health  of  body 
and  soul,  warding  ofiF  the  evil  thoughts  of  idleness.  But  work, 
being  of  this  world,  was  of  no  worth  in  itself.  St.  Augustine, 
when  pressed  by  organizational  problems  of  the  church,  carried 
the  issue  further:  for  monks,  work  is  obligatory,  although  it 
should  alternate  with  prayer,  and  should  engage  them  only 
enough  to  supply  the  real  needs  of  the  establishment.  The  church 
fathers  placed  pure  meditation  on  divine  matters  above  even 
the  intellectual  work  of  reading  and  copying  in  the  monas- 
tery. The  heretical  sects  that  roved  around  Europe  from  the 
eleventh  to  the  fourteenth  century  demanded  work  of  man,  but 
again  for  an  ulterior  reason:  work,  being  painful  and  humiliat- 
ing, should  be  pursued  zealously  as  a  'scourge  for  the  pride  of 
the  flesh.' 

With  Luther,  work  was  first  established  in  the  modem  mind 
as  'the  base  and  key  to  life.'  While  continuing  to  say  that  work 
is  natural  to  fallen  man,  Luther,  echoing  Paul,  added  that  all 
who  can  work  should  do  so.  Idleness  is  an  unnatural  and  evil 
evasion.  To  maintain  oneself  by  work  is  a  way  of  serving  God. 
With  this,  the  great  split  between  religious  piety  and  worldly 
activity  is  resolved;  profession  becomes  'calling,'  and  work  is 
valued  as  a  religious  path  to  salvation. 

Calvin's  idea  of  predestination,  far  from  leading  in  practice  to 
idle  apathy,  prodded  man  further  into  the  rhythm  of  modern 
work.  It  was  necessary  to  act  in  the  world  rationally  and  methodi- 
cally and  continuously  and  hard,  as  if  one  were  certain  of  being 
among  those  elected.  It  is  God's  will  that  everyone  must  work, 
but  it  is  not  God's  will  that  one  should  lust  after  the  fruits  even 
of  one's  own  labor;  they  must  be  reinvested  to  allow  and  to  spur 
still  more  labor.  Not  contemplation,  but  strong-willed,  austere, 


WORK  217 

untiring  work,  based  on  religious  conviction,  will  ease  guilt  and 
lead  to  the  good  and  pious  life. 

The  'this-worldly  asceticism'  of  early  Protestantism  placed  a 
premium  upon  and  justified  the  styles  of  conduct  and  feeling  re- 
quired in  its  agents  by  modem  capitalism.  The  Protestant  sects 
encouraged  and  justified  the  social  development  of  a  type  of 
man  capable  of  ceaseless,  methodical  labor.  The  psychology  of 
the  religious  man  and  of  the  economic  man  thus  coincided,  as 
Max  Weber  has  shown,  and  at  their  point  of  coincidence  the 
sober  bourgeois  entrepreneur  lived  in  and  through  his  work. 

Locke's  notion  that  labor  was  the  origin  of  individual  owner- 
ship and  the  source  of  all  economic  value,  as  elaborated  by  Adam 
Smith,  became  a  keystone  of  the  liberal  economic  system:  work 
was  now  a  controlling  factor  in  the  wealth  of  nations,  but  it  was 
a  soulless  business,  a  harsh  justification  for  the  toiling  grind  of 
nineteenth-century  populations,  and  for  the  economic  man,  who 
was  motivated  in  work  by  the  money  he  earned. 

But  there  was  another  concept  of  work  which  evolved  in  the 
Renaissance;  some  men  of  that  exuberant  time  saw  work  as  a 
spur  rather  than  a  drag  on  man's  development  as  man.  By  his 
own  activity,  man  could  accomplish  anything;  through  work, 
man  became  creator.  How  better  could  he  fill  his  hours?  Leo- 
nardo da  Vinci  rejoiced  in  creative  labor;  Bruno  glorified  work 
as  an  arm  against  adversity  and  a  tool  of  conquest. 

During  the  nineteenth  century  there  began  to  be  reactions 
against  the  Utilitarian  meaning  assigned  to  work  by  classical 
economics,  reactions  that  drew  upon  this  Renaissance  exuber- 
ance. Men,  such  as  Tolstoy,  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  and  William  Morris, 
turned  backward;  others,  such  as  Marx  and  Engels,  looked  for- 
ward. But  both  groups  drew  upon  the  Renaissance  view  of  man 
as  tool  user.  The  division  of  labor  and  the  distribution  of  its 
product,  as  well  as  the  intrinsic  meaning  of  work  as  purposive 
human  activity,  are  at  issue  in  these  nineteenth-century  specula- 
tions. Ruskin's  ideal,  set  against  the  capitalist  organization  of 
work,  rested  on  a  pre-capitalist  society  of  free  artisans  whose 
work  is  at  once  a  necessity  for  livelihood  and  an  act  of  art  that 
brings  inner  calm.  He  glorified  what  he  supposed  was  in  the  work 
of  the  medieval  artisan;  he  believed  that  the  total  product  of 


218  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

work  should  go  to  the  worker.  Profit  on  capital  is  an  injustice  and, 
moreover,  to  strive  for  profit  for  its  own  sake  blights  the  soul 
and  puts  man  into  a  frenzy. 

In  Marx  we  encounter  a  full-scale  analysis  of  the  meaning  of 
work  in  human  development  as  well  as  of  the  distortions  of  this 
development  in  capitalist  society.  Here  the  essence  of  the  human 
being  rests  upon  his  work:  'What  [individuals]  .  .  .  are  .  .  .  co- 
incides with  their  production,  both  with  what  they  produce  and 
with  how  they  produce.  The  nature  of  individuals  thus  depends 
on  the  material  conditions  determining  their  production.'  Capi- 
talist production,  thought  Marx,  who  accepted  the  humanist  ideal 
of  classic  German  idealism  of  the  all-round  personality,  has 
twisted  men  into  alien  and  specialized  animal-like  and  deperson- 
alized creatures. 

Historically,  most  views  of  work  have  ascribed  to  it  an  extrinsic 
meaning.  R.  H.  Tawney  refers  to  'the  distinction  made  by  the 
philosophers  of  classical  antiquity  between  liberal  and  servile 
occupations,  the  medieval  insistence  that  riches  exist  for  man, 
not  man  for  riches.  Ruskin's  famous  outburst,  "there  is  no  wealth 
but  life,"  the  argument  of  the  Socialist  who  urges  that  production 
should  be  organized  for  service,  not  for  profit,  are  but  different 
attempts  to  emphasize  the  instrumental  character  of  economic 
activities  by  reference  to  an  ideal  which  is  held  to  express  the 
true  nature  of  man.'  But  there  are  also  those  who  ascribe  to  work 
an  intrinsic  worth.  All  philosophies  of  work  may  be  divided  into 
these  two  views,  although  in  a  curious  way  Carlyle  managed  to 
combine  the  two. 

I,  The  various  forms  of  Protestantism,  which  (along  with  clas- 
sical economics )  have  been  the  most  influential  doctrines  in  mod- 
ern times,  see  work  activity  as  ulterior  to  religious  sanctions; 
gratifications  from  work  are  not  intrinsic  to  the  activity  and  ex- 
perience, but  are  religious  rewards.  By  work  one  gains  a  religious 
status  and  assures  oneself  of  being  among  the  elect.  If  work  is 
compulsive  it  is  due  to  the  painful  guilt  that  arises  when  one 
does  not  work. 

II.  The  Renaissance  view  of  work,  which  sees  it  as  intrinsically 
meaningful,  is  centered  in  the  technical  craftsmanship— the  man- 
ual and  mental  operations— of  the  work  process  itself;  it  sees  the 


WORK  219 

reasons  for  work  in  the  work  itself  and  not  in  any  ulterior  realm 
or  consequence.  Not  income,  not  way  of  salvation,  not  status, 
not  power  over  other  people,  but  the  technical  processes  them- 
selves are  gratifying. 

Neither  of  these  views,  however— the  secularized  gospel  of 
work  as  compulsion,  nor  the  humanist  view  of  work  as  crafts- 
manship—now has  great  influence  among  modem  populations. 
For  most  employees,  work  has  a  generally  unpleasant  quality.  If 
there  is  little  Calvinist  compulsion  to  work  among  propertyless 
factory  workers  and  file  clerks,  there  is  also  little  Renaissance 
exuberance  in  the  work  of  the  insurance  clerk,  freight  handler, 
or  department-store  saleslady.  If  the  shoe  salesman  or  the  tex- 
tile executive  gives  little  thought  to  the  religious  meaning  of  his 
labor,  certainly  few  telephone  operators  or  receptionists  or  school- 
teachers experience  from  their  work  any  Ruskinesque  inner  calm. 
Such  joy  as  creative  work  may  carry  is  more  and  more  limited 
to  a  small  minority.  For  the  white-collar  masses,  as  for  wage 
earners  generally,  work  seems  to  serve  neither  God  nor  what- 
ever they  may  experience  as  divine  in  themselves.  In  them  there 
is  no  taut  will-to-work,  and  few  positive  gratifications  from  their 
daily  round. 

The  gospel  of  work  has  been  central  to  the  historic  tradition 
of  America,  to  its  image  of  itself,  and  to  the  images  the  rest  of 
the  world  has  of  America.  The  crisis  and  decline  of  that  gospel 
are  of  wide  and  deep  meaning.  On  every  hand,  we  hear,  in  the 
words  of  Wade  Shortleff  for  example,  that  'the  aggressiveness 
and  enthusiasm  which  marked  other  generations  is  withering, 
and  in  its  stead  we  find  the  philosophy  that  attaining  and  hold- 
ing a  job  is  not  a  challenge  but  a  necessary  evil.  When  work  be- 
comes just  work,  activity  undertaken  only  for  reason  of  sub- 
sistence, the  spirit  which  fired  our  nation  to  its  present  greatness 
has  died  to  a  spark.  An  ominous  apathy  cloaks  the  smoldering 
discontent  and  restlessness  of  the  management  men  of  to- 
morrow.' 

To  understand  the  significance  of  this  gospel  and  its  decline, 
we  must  understand  the  very  spirit  of  twentieth-century  America. 
That  the  historical  work  ethic  of  the  old  middle-class  entrepre- 
neurs has  not  deeply  gripped  the  people  of  the  new  society  is 
one  of  the  most  crucial  psychological  implications  of  the  strue- 


220  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

tural  decline  of  the  old  middle  classes.  The  new  middle  class, 
despite  the  old  middle-class  origin  of  many  of  its  members,  has 
never  been  deeply  involved  in  the  older  work  ethic,  and  on  this 
point  has  been  from  the  beginning  non-bourgeois  in  mentality. 
At  the  same  time,  the  second  historically  important  model  of 
meaningful  work  and  gratification— craftsmanship— has  never  be- 
longed to  the  new  middle  classes,  either  by  tradition  or  by  the  na- 
ture of  their  work.  Nevertheless,  the  model  of  craftsmanship  lies, 
however  vaguely,  back  of  most  serious  studies  of  worker  dissatis- 
faction today,  of  most  positive  statements  of  worker  gratification, 
from  Ruskin  and  Tolstoy  to  Bergson  and  Sorel.  Therefore,  it  is 
worth  considering  in  some  detail,  in  order  that  we  may  then 
gauge  in  just  what  respects  its  realization  is  impossible  for  the 
modem  white-collar  worker. 

2.  The  Ideal  of  Craftsmanship 

Craftsmanship  as  a  fully  idealized  model  of  work  gratification 
involves  six  major  features:  There  is  no  ulterior  motive  in  work 
other  than  the  product  being  made  and  the  processes  of  its  cre- 
ation. The  details  of  daily  work  are  meaningful  because  they  are 
not  detached  in  the  worker's  mind  from  the  product  of  the  work. 
The  worker  is  free  to  control  his  own  working  action.  The  crafts- 
man is  thus  able  to  learn  from  his  work;  and  to  use  and  develop 
his  capacities  and  skills  in  its  prosecution.  There  is  no  split  of 
work  and  play,  or  work  and  culture.  The  craftsman's  way  of 
livelihood   determines   and   infuses   his   entire   mode   of  living. 

I.  The  hope  in  good  work,  William  Morris  remarked,  is  hope 
of  product  and  hope  of  pleasure  in  the  work  itself;  the  supreme 
concern,  the  whole  attention,  is  with  the  quality  of  the  product 
and  the  skill  of  its  making.  There  is  an  inner  relation  between 
the  craftsman  and  the  thing  he  makes,  from  the  image  he  first 
forms  of  it  through  its  completion,  which  goes  beyond  the  mere 
legal  relations  of  property  and  makes  the  craftsman's  will-to-work 
spontaneous  and  even  exuberant. 

Other  motives  and  results— money  or  reputation  or  salvation- 
are  subordinate.  It  is  not  essential  to  the  practice  of  the  craft 
ethic  that  one  necessarily  improves  one's  status  either  in  the  re- 


WORK  221 

ligious  community  or  in  the  community  in  general.  Work  grati- 
fication is  such  that  a  man  may  live  in  a  kind  of  quiet  passion  'for 
his  work  alone.' 

II.  In  most  statements  of  craftsmanship,  there  is  a  confusion 
between  its  technical  and  aesthetic  conditions  and  the  legal 
(property)  organization  of  the  worker  and  the  product.  What  is 
actually  necessary  for  work-as-craftsmanship,  however,  is  that 
the  tie  between  the  product  and  the  producer  be  psychologically 
possible;  if  the  producer  does  not  legally  own  the  product  he 
must  own  it  psychologically  in  the  sense  that  he  knows  what 
goes  into  it  by  way  of  skill,  sweat,  and  material  and  that  his  own 
skill  and  sweat  are  visible  to  him.  Of  course,  if  legal  conditions 
are  such  that  the  tie  between  the  work  and  the  worker's  material 
advantage  is  transparent,  this  is  a  further  gratification,  but  it  is 
subordinate  to  that  workmanship  which  would  continue  of  its 
own  will  even  if  not  paid  for. 

The  craftsman  has  an  image  of  the  completed  product,  and 
even  though  he  does  not  make  it  all,  he  sees  the  place  of  his  part 
in  the  whole,  and  thus  understands  the  meaning  of  his  exertion 
in  terms  of  that  whole.  The  satisfaction  he  has  in  the  result  in- 
fuses the  means  of  achieving  it,  and  in  this  way  his  work  is  not 
only  meaningful  to  him  but  also  partakes  of  the  consummatory 
satisfaction  he  has  in  the  product.  If  work,  in  some  of  its  phases, 
has  the  taint  of  travail  and  vexation  and  mechanical  drudgery, 
still  the  craftsman  is  carried  over  these  junctures  by  keen  an- 
ticipation. He  may  even  gain  positive  satisfaction  from  encoun- 
tering a  resistance  and  conquering  it,  feeling  his  work  and  will 
as  powerfully  victorious  over  the  recalcitrance  of  materials  and 
the  malice  of  things.  Indeed,  without  this  resistance  he  would 
gain  less  satisfaction  in  being  finally  victorious  over  that  which 
at  first  obstinately  resists  his  will. 

George  Mead  has  stated  this  kind  of  aesthetic  experience  as 
involving  the  power  'to  catch  the  enjoyment  that  belongs  to  the 
consummation,  the  outcome,  of  an  undertaking  and  to  give  to 
the  implements,  the  objects  that  are  instrumental  in  the  under- 
taking, and  to  the  acts  that  compose  it  something  of  the  joy  and 
satisfaction  that  suffuse  its  successful  accomplishment.' 


222  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

in.  The  workman  is  free  to  begin  his  work  according  to  his 
own  plan  and,  during  the  activity  by  which  it  is  shaped,  he  is 
free  to  modify  its  form  and  the  manner  of  its  creation.  In  both 
these  senses,  Henri  De  Man  observed,  'plan  and  performance  are 
one,'  and  the  craftsman  is  master  of  the  activity  and  of  himself 
in  the  process.  This  continual  joining  of  plan  and  activity  brings 
even  more  firmly  together  the  consummation  of  work  and  its 
instrumental  activities,  infusing  the  latter  with  the  joy  of  the 
former.  It  also  means  that  his  sphere  of  independent  action  is 
large  and  rational  to  him.  He  is  responsible  for  its  outcome  and 
free  to  assume  that  responsibility.  His  problems  and  difficulties 
must  be  solved  by  him,  in  terms  of  the  shape  he  wants  the  final 
outcome  to  assume. 

IV.  The  craftsman's  work  is  thus  a  means  of  developing  his 
skill,  as  well  as  a  means  of  developing  himself  as  a  man.  It  is  not 
that  self-development  is  an  ulterior  goal,  but  that  such  develop- 
ment is  the  cumulative  result  obtained  by  devotion  to  and  prac- 
tice of  his  skills.  As  he  gives  it  the  quality  of  his  own  mind  and 
skill,  he  is  also  further  developing  his  own  nature;  in  this  simple 
sense,  he  lives  in  and  through  his  work,  which  confesses  and 
reveals  him  to  the  world. 

v.  In  the  craftsman  pattern  there  is  no  split  of  work  and  play, 
of  work  and  culture.  If  play  is  supposed  to  be  an  activity,  exer- 
cised for  its  own  sake,  having  no  aim  other  than  gratifying  the 
actor,  then  work  is  supposed  to  be  an  activity  performed  to 
create  economic  value  or  for  some  other  ulterior  result.  Play  is 
something  you  do  to  be  happily  occupied,  but  if  work  occupies 
you  happily,  it  is  also  play,  although  it  is  also  serious,  just  as 
play  is  to  the  child.  'Really  free  work,  the  work  of  a  composer, 
for  example,'  Marx  once  wrote  of  Fourier's  notions  of  work  and 
play,  'is  damned  serious  work,  intense  strain.'  The  simple  self- 
expression  of  play  and  the  creation  of  ulterior  value  of  work  are 
combined  in  work-as-craftsmanship.  The  craftsman  or  artist  ex- 
presses himself  at  the  same  time  and  in  the  same  act  as  he  cre- 
ates value.  His  work  is  a  poem  in  action.  He  is  at  work  and  at 
play  in  the  same  act. 


WORK  223 

'Work'  and  'culture'  are  not,  as  Gentile  has  held,  separate 
spheres,  the  first  dealing  with  means,  the  second  with  ends  in 
themselves;  as  Tilgher,  Sorel,  and  others  have  indicated,  either 
work  or  culture  may  be  an  end  in  itself,  a  means,  or  may  contain 
segments  of  both  ends  and  means.  In  the  craft  model  of  activity, 
'consumption'  and  'production'  are  blended  in  the  same  act; 
active  craftsmanship,  which  is  both  play  and  work,  is  the  medium 
of  culture;  and  for  the  craftsman  there  is  no  split  between  the 
worlds  of  culture  and  work. 

VI.  The  craftsman's  work  is  the  mainspring  of  the  only  life 
he  knows;  he  does  not  flee  from  work  into  a  separate  sphere  of 
leisure;  he  brings  to  his  non-working  hours  the  values  and  quali- 
ties developed  and  employed  in  his  working  time.  His  idle  con- 
versation is  shop  talk;  his  friends  follow  the  same  lines  of  work 
as  he,  and  share  a  kinship  of  feeling  and  thought.  The  leisure 
William  Morris  called  for  was  'leisure  to  think  about  our  work, 
that  faithful  daily  companion.  .  .' 

In  order  to  give  his  work  the  freshness  of  creativity,  the  crafts- 
man must  at  times  open  himself  up  to  those  influences  that  only 
affect  us  when  our  attentions  are  relaxed.  Thus  for  the  crafts- 
man, apart  from  mere  animal  rest,  leisure  may  occur  in  such 
intermittent  periods  as  are  necessary  for  individuality  in  his  work. 
As  he  brings  to  his  leisure  the  capacity  and  problems  of  his  work, 
so  he  brings  back  into  work  those  sensitivities  he  would  not  gain 
in  periods  of  high,  sustained  tension  necessary  for  solid  work. 

'The  world  of  art,'  wrote  Paul  Bourget,  speaking  of  America, 
'requires  less  self-consciousness— an  impulse  of  life  which  forgets 
itself,  the  alternation  of  dreamy  idleness  with  fervid  execution.' 
The  same  point  is  made  by  Henry  James,  in  his  essay  on  Balzac, 
who  remarks  that  we  have  practically  lost  the  faculty  of  atten- 
tion, meaning  .  .  .  'that  unstrenuous,  brooding  sort  of  attention 
required  to  produce  or  appreciate  works  of  art.'  Even  rest,  which 
is  not  so  directly  connected  with  work  itself  as  a  condition  of 
creativity,  is  animal  rest,  made  secure  and  freed  from  anxiety 
by  virtue  of  work  done— in  Tilgher's  words,  'a  sense  of  peace  and 
calm  which  flows  from  all  well-regulated,  disciplined  work  done 
with  a  quiet  and  contented  mind.' 


224  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

In  constructing  this  model  of  craftsmanship,  we  do  not  mean 
to  imply  that  there  ever  was  a  community  in  which  work  car- 
ried all  these  meanings.  Whether  the  medieval  artisan  approxi- 
mated the  model  as  closely  as  some  writers  seem  to  assume,  we 
do  not  know;  but  we  entertain  serious  doubts  that  this  is  so;  we 
lack  enough  psychological  knowledge  of  medieval  populations 
properly  to  judge.  At  any  rate,  for  our  purposes  it  is  enough  to 
know  that  at  different  times  and  in  different  occupations,  the 
work  men  do  has  carried  one  or  more  features  of  craftsmanship. 

With  such  a  model  in  mind,  a  glance  at  the  occupational  world 
of  the  modern  worker  is  enough  to  make  clear  that  practically 
none  of  these  aspects  are  now  relewmt  to  modern  work  experi- 
ence. The  model  of  craftsmanship  has  become  an  anachronism. 
We  use  the  model  as  an  explicit  ideal  in  terms  of  which  we  can 
summarize  the  working  conditions  and  the  personal  meaning 
work  has  in  modern  work-worlds,  and  especially  to  white-collar 
people. 

3.  The  Conditions  of  Modern  Work 

As  practice,  craftsmanship  has  largely  been  trivialized  into 
'hobbies,'  part  of  leisure  not  of  work;  or  ff  work— a  marketable 
activity— it  is  the  work  of  scattered  mechanics  in  handicraft 
trades,  and  of  professionals  who  manage  to  remain  free.  As  ethic, 
craftsmanship  is  confined  to  minuscule  groups  of  privileged  pro- 
fessionals and  intellectuals. 

The  entire  shift  from  the  rural  world  of  the  small  entrepreneur 
to  the  urban  society  of  the  dependent  employee  has  instituted 
the  property  conditions  of  alienation  from  product  and  processes 
of  work.  Of  course,  dependent  occupations  vary  in  the  extent 
of  initiative  they  allow  and  invite,  and  many  self-employed  enter- 
prisers are  neither  as  independent  nor  as  enterprising  as  com- 
monly supposed.  Nevertheless,  in  almost  any  job,  the  employee 
sells  a  degree  of  his  independence;  his  working  life  is  within  the 
domain  of  others;  the  level  of  his  skills  that  are  used  and  the 
areas  in  which  he  may  exercise  independent  decisions  are  subject 
to  management  by  others.  Probably  at  least  ten  or  twelve  million 
people  worked  during  the  'thirties  at  tasks  below  the  skill  level 
of  which  they  were  easily  capable;  and,  as  school  attendance  in- 


WORK  225 

creases  and  more  jobs  are  routinized,  the  number  of  people  who 
must  work  below  their  capacities  will  increase. 

There  is  considerable  truth  in  the  statement  that  those  who 
find  free  expression  of  self  in  their  work  are  those  who  securely 
own  the  property  with  which  they  work,  or  those  whose  work- 
freedom  does  not  entail  the  ownership  of  property.  'Those  who 
have  no  money  work  sloppily  under  the  name  of  sabotage,'  writes 
Charles  Peguy,  'and  those  who  have  money  work  sloppily,  a 
counter  and  different  sloppiness,  under  the  name  of  luxury.  And 
thus  culture  no  longer  has  any  medium  through  which  it  might 
infiltrate.  There  no  longer  exists  that  marvelous  unity  true  of  all 
ancient  societies,  where  he  who  produced  and  he  who  bought 
equally  loved  and  knew  culture.' 

The  objective  alienation  of  man  from  the  product  and  the 
process  of  work  is  entailed  by  the  legal  framework  of  modern 
capitalism  and  the  modern  division  of  labor.  The  worker  does 
not  own  the  product  or  the  tools  of  his  production.  In  the  labor 
contract  he  sells  his  time,  energy,  and  skill  into  the  power  of 
others.  To  understand  self-alienation  we  need  not  accept  the 
metaphysical  view  that  man's  self  is  most  crucially  expressed  in 
work-activity.  In  all  work  involving  the  personality  market,  as 
we  have  seen,  one's  personality  and  personal  traits  become  part 
of  the  means  of  production.  In  this  sense  a  person  instrumental- 
izes  and  externalizes  intimate  features  of  his  person  and  disposi- 
tion. In  certain  white-collar  areas,  the  rise  of  personality  markets 
has  carried  self  and  social  alienation  to  explicit  extremes. 

Thoreau,  who  spoke  for  the  small  entrepreneur,  objected,  in 
the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  'to  the  division  of  labor 
since  it  divided  the  worker,  not  merely  the  work,  reduced  him 
from  a  man  to  an  operative,  and  enriched  the  few  at  the  expense 
of  the  many.'  'It  destroyed,'  wrote  F.  O.  Matthiessen,  'the  poten- 
tial balance  of  his  [Thoreau's]  agrarian  world,  one  of  the  main 
ideals  of  which  was  the  union  of  labor  and  culture.' 

The  detailed  division  of  labor  means,  of  course,  that  the  indi- 
vidual does  not  carry  through  the  whole  process  of  work  to  its 
final  product;  but  it  also  means  that  under  many  modern  condi- 
tions the  process  itself  is  invisible  to  him.  The  product  as  the 
goal  of  his  work  is  legally  and  psychologically  detached  from 
him,  and  this  detachment  cuts  the  nerve  of  meaning  which  work 


226  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

might  otherwise  gain  from  its  technical  processes.  Even  on  the 
professional  levels  of  white-collar  work,  not  to  speak  of  wage- 
work  and  the  lower  white-collar  tasks,  the  chance  to  develop 
and  use  individual  rationality  is  often  destroyed  by  the  centrali- 
zation of  decision  and  the  formal  rationality  that  bureaucracy 
entails.  The  expropriation  which  modern  work  organization  has 
carried  through  thus  goes  far  beyond  the  expropriation  of  own- 
ership; rationality  itself  has  been  expropriated  from  work  and 
any  total  view  and  understanding  of  its  process.  No  longer  free 
to  plan  his  work,  much  less  to  modify  the  plan  to  which  he  is 
subordinated,  the  individual  is  to  a  great  extent  managed  and 
manipulated  in  his  work. 

The  world  market,  of  which  Marx  spoke  as  the  alien  power 
over  men,  has  in  many  areas  been  replaced  by  the  bureaucratized 
enterprise.  Not  the  market  as  such  but  centralized  administrative 
decisions  determine  when  men  work  and  how  fast.  Yet  the  more 
and  the  harder  men  work,  the  more  they  build  up  that  which 
dominates  their  work  as  an  alien  force,  the  commodity;  so  also, 
the  more  and  the  harder  the  white-collar  man  works,  the  more 
he  builds  up  the  enterprise  outside  himself,  which  is,  as  we  have 
seen,  duly  made  a  fetish  and  thus  indirectly  justified.  The  enter- 
prise is  not  the  institutional  shadow  of  great  men,  as  perhaps  it 
seemed  under  the  old  captain  of  industry;  nor  is  it  the  instrument 
through  which  men  realize  themselves  in  work,  as  in  small-scale 
production.  The  enterprise  is  an  impersonal  and  alien  Name, 
and  the  more  that  is  placed  in  it,  the  less  is  placed  in  man. 

As  tool  becomes  machine,  man  is  estranged  from  the  intel- 
lectual potentialities  and  aspects  of  work;  and  each  individual 
is  routinized  in  the  name  of  increased  and  cheaper  per  unit  pro- 
ductivity. The  whole  unit  and  meaning  of  time  is  modified; 
man's  'life-time,'  wrote  Marx,  is  transformed  into  'working-time.' 
In  tying  down  individuals  to  particular  tasks  and  jobs,  the  divi- 
sion of  labor  'lays  the  foundation  of  that  all-engrossing  system  of 
specializing  and  sorting  men,  that  development  in  a  man  of  one 
single  faculty  at  the  expense  of  all  other  faculties,  which  caused 
A.  Ferguson,  the  master  of  Adam  Smith,  to  exclaim:  "We  make 
a  nation  of  Helots,  and  have  no  free  citizens." ' 

The  introduction  of  office  machinery  and  sales  devices  has 
been  mechanizing  the  office  and  the  salesroom,  the  two  big  lo- 


WORK  227 

cales  of  white-collar  work.  Since  the  'twenties  it  has  increased 
the  division  of  white-collar  labor,  recomposed  personnel,  and 
lowered  skill  levels.  Routine  operations  in  minutely  subdivided 
organizations  have  replaced  the  bustling  interest  of  work  in  well- 
known  groups.  Even  on  managerial  and  professional  levels,  the 
growth  of  rational  bureaucracies  has  made  work  more  like  fac- 
tory production.  The  managerial  demiurge  is  constantly  further- 
ing all  these  trends:  mechanization,  more  minute  division  of 
labor,  the  use  of  less  skilled  and  less  expensive  workers. 

In  its  early  stages,  a  new  division  of  labor  may  specialize  men 
in  such  a  way  as  to  increase  their  levels  of  skill;  but  later,  espe- 
cially when  whole  operations  are  split  and  mechanized,  such 
division  develops  certain  faculties  at  the  expense  of  others  and 
narrows  all  of  them.  And  as  it  comes  more  fully  under  mechani- 
zation and  centralized  management,  it  levels  men  off  again  as 
automatons.  Then  there  are  a  few  specialists  and  a  mass  of 
automatons;  both  integrated  by  the  authority  which  makes  them 
interdependent  and  keeps  each  in  his  own  routine.  Thus,  in  the 
division  of  labor,  the  open  development  and  free  exercise  of  skills 
are  managed  and  closed. 

The  alienating  conditions  of  modem  work  now  include  the 
salaried  employees  as  well  as  the  wage-workers.  There  are  few, 
if  any,  features  of  wage-work  (except  heavy  toil— which  is  de- 
creasingly  a  factor  in  wage-work)  that  do  not  also  characterize 
at  least  some  white-collar  work.  For  here,  too,  the  human  traits 
of  the  individual,  from  his  physique  to  his  psychic  disposition, 
become  units  in  the  functionally  rational  calculation  of  managers. 
None  of  the  features  of  work  as  craftsmanship  is  prevalent  in 
office  and  salesroom,  and,  in  addition,  some  features  of  white- 
collar  work,  such  as  the  personality  market,  go  well  beyond  the 
alienating  conditions  of  wage-work. 

Yet,  as  Henri  De  Man  has  pointed  out,  we  cannot  assume  that 
the  employee  makes  comparisons  between  the  ideal  of  work  as 
craftsmanship  and  his  own  working  experience.  We  cannot  com- 
pare the  idealized  portrait  of  the  craftsman  with  that  of  the  auto 
worker  and  on  that  basis  impute  any  psychological  state  to  the 
auto  worker.  We  cannot  fruitfully  compare  the  psychological 
condition  of  the  old  merchant's  assistant  with  the  modem  sales- 
lady, or  the  old-fashioned  bookkeeper  with  the  IBM  machine 


228  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

attendant.  For  the  historical  destruction  of  craftsmanship  and  of 
the  old  oflBce  does  not  enter  the  consciousness  of  the  modern 
wage-worker  or  white-collar  employee;  much  less  is  their  absence 
felt  by  him  as  a  crisis,  as  it  might  have  been  if,  in  the  course  of 
the  last  generation,  his  father  or  mother  had  been  in  the  craft 
condition— but,  statistically  speaking,  they  have  not  been.  It  is 
slow  historical  fact,  long  gone  by  in  any  dramatic  consequence 
and  not  of  psychological  relevance  to  the  present  generation. 
Only  the  psychological  imagination  of  the  historian  makes  it  pos- 
sible to  write  of  such  comparisons  as  if  they  were  of  psychologi- 
cal import.  The  craft  life  would  be  immediately  available  as  a 
fact  of  their  consciousness  only  if  in  the  lifetime  of  the  modem 
employees  they  had  experienced  a  shift  from  the  one  condition 
to  the  other,  which  they  have  not;  or  if  they  had  grasped  it  as 
an  ideal  meaning  of  work,  which  they  have  not. 

But  if  the  work  white-collar  people  do  is  not  connected  with 
its  resultant  product,  and  if  there  is  no  intrinsic  connection  be- 
tween work  and  the  rest  of  their  life,  then  they  must  accept  their 
work  as  meaningless  in  itself,  perform  it  with  more  or  less  dis- 
gruntlement,  and  seek  meanings  elsewhere.  Of  their  work,  as  of 
all  of  our  lives,  it  can  truly  be  said,  in  Henri  Bergson's  words, 
that:  'The  greater  part  of  our  time  we  live  outside  ourselves, 
hardly  perceiving  anything  of  ourselves  but  our  own  ghost,  a 
colourless  shadow.  .  .  Hence  we  live  for  the  external  world 
rather  than  for  ourselves;  we  speak  rather  than  think;  we  are 
acted  rather  than  act  ourselves.  To  act  freely  is  to  recover  pos- 
session of  oneself,  .  .' 

If  white-collar  people  are  not  free  to  control  their  working 
actions  they,  in  time,  habitually  submit  to  the  orders  of  others 
and,  in  so  far  as  they  try  to  act  freely,  do  so  in  other  spheres.  If 
they  do  not  learn  from  their  work  or  develop  themselves  in  doing 
it,  in  time,  they  cease  trying  to  do  so,  often  having  no  interest  in 
self-development  even  in  other  areas.  If  there  is  a  split  between 
their  work  and  play,  and  their  work  and  culture,  they  admit  that 
split  as  a  common-sense  fact  of  existence.  If  their  way  of  earning 
a  living  does  not  infuse  their  mode  of  living,  they  try  to  build 
their  real  life  outside  their  work.  Work  becomes  a  sacrifice  of 
time,  necessary  to  building  a  life  outside  of  it. 


WORK  229 

4.  Frames  of  Acceptance 

Underneath  virtually  all  experience  of  work  today,  there  is  a 
fatalistic  feeling  that  work  per  se  is  unpleasant.  One  type  of 
work,  or  one  particular  job,  is  contrasted  with  another  type,  ex- 
perienced or  imagined,  within  the  present  world  of  work;  judg- 
ments are  rarely  made  about  the  world  of  work  as  presently 
organized  as  against  some  other  way  of  organizing  it;  so  also, 
satisfaction  from  work  is  felt  in  comparison  with  the  satisfac- 
tions of  other  jobs. 

We  do  not  know  what  proportions  of  the  U.S.  white-collar 
strata  are  'satisfied'  by  their  work  and,  more  important,  we  do 
not  know  what  being  satisfied  means  to  them.  But  it  is  possible 
to  speculate  fruitfully  about  such  questions. 

We  do  have  the  results  of  some  questions,  necessarily  crude, 
regarding  feelings  about  present  jobs.  As  in  almost  every  other 
area,  when  sponge  questions  are  asked  of  a  national  cross-section, 
white-collar  people,  meaning  here  clerical  and  sales  employees, 
are  in  the  middle  zones.  They  stand  close  to  the  national  average 
(64  per  cent  asserting  they  find  their  work  interesting  and  en- 
joyable 'all  the  time'),  while  more  of  the  professionals  and  execu- 
tives claim  interest  and  enjoyment  (85  per  cent),  and  fewer  of 
the  factory  workers  (41  per  cent)  do  so. 

Within  the  white-collar  hierarchy,  job  satisfaction  seems  to 
follow  the  hierarchical  levels;  in  one  study,  for  example,  86  per 
cent  of  the  professionals,  74  per  cent  of  the  managerial,  42  per 
cent  of  the  commercial  employees,  stated  general  satisfaction. 
This  is  also  true  of  wage-worker  levels  of  skill:  56  per  cent  of 
the  skilled,  but  48  per  cent  of  the  semi-skilled,  are  satisfied. 

Such  figures  tell  us  very  little,  since  we  do  not  know  what  the 
questions  mean  to  the  people  who  answer  them,  or  whether  they 
mean  the  same  thing  to  different  strata.  However,  work  satisfac- 
tion is  related  to  income  and,  if  we  had  measures,  we  might  find 
that  it  is  also  related  to  status  as  well  as  to  power.  What  such 
questions  probably  measure  are  invidious  judgments  of  the  indi- 
vidual's standing  with  reference  to  other  individuals.  And  the 
aspects  of  work,  the  terms  of  such  comparisons,  must  be  made 
clear. 


230  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

Under  modern  conditions,  the  direct  technical  processes  of 
work  have  been  decHning  in  meaning  for  the  mass  of  employees, 
but  other  features  of  work— income,  power,  status— have  come 
to  the  fore.  Apart  from  the  technical  operations  and  the  skills 
involved,  work  is  a  source  of  income;  the  amount,  level,  and 
security  of  pay,  and  what  one's  income  history  has  been  are  part 
X)f  work's  meaning.  Work  is  also  a  means  of  gaining  status,  at  the 
place  of  work,  and  in  the  general  community.  Different  types  of 
work  and  different  occupational  levels  carry  differential  status 
values.  These  again  are  part  of  the  meaning  of  the  job.  And  also 
work  carries  various  sorts  of  power,  over  materials  and  tools  and 
machines,  but,  more  crucially  now,  over  other  people. 

I.  Income:  The  economic  motives  for  work  are  now  its  only 
firm  rationale.  Work  now  has  no  other  legitimating  symbols, 
although  certainly  other  gratifications  and  discontents  are  associ- 
ated with  it.  The  division  of  labor  and  the  routinization  of  many 
job  areas  are  reducing  work  to  a  commodity,  of  which  money 
has  become  the  only  common  denominator.  To  the  worker  who 
cannot  receive  technical  gratifications  from  his  work,  its  market 
value  is  all  there  is  to  it.  The  only  significant  occupational  move- 
ment in  the  United  States,  the  trade  unions,  have  the  pure  and 
simple  ideology  of  alienated  work:  more  and  more  money  for 
less  and  less  work.  There  are,  of  course,  other  demands,  but  they 
can  be  only  'fixed  up'  to  lessen  the  cry  for  more  money.  The 
sharp  focus  upon  money  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  lack  of  in- 
trinsic meaning  that  work  has  come  to  have. 

Underlying  the  modern  approach  to  work  there  seems  to  be 
some  vague  feeling  that  'one  should  earn  one's  own  living,'  a 
kind  of  Protestant  undertow,  attenuated  into  a  secular  conven- 
tion. 'When  work  goes,'  as  H.  A.  Overstreet,  a  job  psychologist 
writing  of  the  slump,  puts  it,  'we  know  that  the  tragedy  is  more 
than  economic.  It  is  psychological.  It  strikes  at  the  center  of  our 
personality.  It  takes  from  us  something  that  rightly  belongs  to 
every  self-respecting  human  being.'  But  income  security— the 
fear  of  unemployment  or  under-employment— is  more  important. 
An  undertow  of  anxiety  about  sickness,  accident,  or  old  age  must 
support  eagerness  for  work,  and  gratification  may  be  based  on 
the  compulsion  to  relieve  anxiety  by  working  hard.  Widespread 


WORK  231 

unemployment,  or  fear  of  it,  may  even  make  an  employee  hap- 
pily thankful  for  any  job,  contented  to  be  at  any  kind  of  work 
when  all  around  there  are  many  workless,  worried  people.  If 
satisfaction  rests  on  relative  status,  there  is  here  an  invidious  ele- 
ment that  increases  it.  It  is  across  this  ground  tone  of  convention 
and  fear,  built  around  work  as  a  source  of  income,  that  other 
motives  to  work  and  other  factors  of  satisfaction  are  available. 

n.  Status:  Income  and  income  security  lead  to  other  things, 
among  them,  status.  With  the  decline  of  technical  gratification, 
the  employee  often  tries  to  center  such  meaning  as  he  finds  in 
work  on  other  features  of  the  job.  Satisfaction  in  work  often  rests 
upon  status  satisfactions  from  work  associations.  As  a  social  role 
played  in  relation  to  other  people,  work  may  become  a  source 
of  self-esteem,  on  the  job,  among  co-workers,  superiors,  subor- 
dinates, and  customers,  if  any;  and  off  the  job,  among  friends, 
family,  and  community  at  large.  The  fact  of  doing  one  kind  of 
job  rather  than  another  and  doing  one's  job  with  skill  and  dis- 
patch may  be  a  source  of  self-esteem.  For  the  man  or  woman 
lonely  in  the  city,  the  mere  fact  of  meeting  people  at  the  place 
of  work  may  be  a  positive  thing.  Even  anonymous  work  contacts 
in  large  enterprises  may  be  highly  esteemed  by  those  who  feel 
too  closely  bound  by  family  and  neighborhood.  There  is  a  grati- 
fication from  working  downtown  in  the  city,  uptown  in  the 
smaller  urban  center;  there  is  the  glamour  of  being  attached  to 
certain  firms. 

It  is  the  status  conferred  on  the  exercise  of  given  skills  and  on 
given  income  levels  that  is  often  the  prime  source  of  gratification 
or  humiliation.  The  psychological  effect  of  a  detailed  division  of 
labor  depends  upon  whether  or  not  the  worker  has  been  down- 
graded, and  upon  whether  or  not  his  associates  have  also  been 
downgraded.  Pride  in  skill  is  relative  to  the  skills  he  has  exer- 
cised in  the  past  and  to  the  skills  others  exercise,  and  thus  to 
the  evaluation  of  his  skills  by  other  people  whose  opinions  count. 
In  like  manner,  the  amount  of  money  he  receives  may  be  seen 
by  the  employee  and  by  others  as  the  best  gauge  of  his  worth. 

This  may  be  all  the  more  true  when  relations  are  increasingly 
'objectified'  and  do  not  require  intimate  knowledge.  For  then 
there  may  be  anxiety  to  keep  secret  the  amount  of  money  earned. 


232  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

and  even  to  suggest  to  others  that  one  earns  more.  'Who  earns 
the  most?'  asks  Erich  Engelhard.  'That  is  the  important  question, 
that  is  the  gauge  of  all  differentiations  and  the  yardstick  of  the 
moneyed  classes.  We  do  not  wish  to  show  how  we  work,  for  in 
most  cases  others  will  soon  have  learned  our  tricks.  This  explains 
all  the  bragging.  "The  work  I  have  to  do! "  exclaims  one  employee 
when  he  has  only  three  letters  to  write.  .  .  This  boastfulness  can 
be  explained  by  a  drive  which  impels  certain  people  to  evaluate 
their  occupations  very  low  in  comparison  with  their  intellectual 
aspirations  but  very  high  compared  with  the  occupations  of 
others.' 

in.  Power:  Power  over  the  technical  aspects  of  work  has  been 
stripped  from  the  individual,  first,  by  the  development  of  the 
market,  which  determines  how  and  when  he  works,  and  second, 
by  the  bureaucratization  of  the  work  sphere,  which  subjects  work 
operations  to  discipline.  By  virtue  of  these  two  alien  forces  the 
individual  has  lost  power  over  the  technical  operations  of  his 
own  work  life. 

But  the  exercise  of  power  over  other  people  has  been  elabo- 
rated. In  so  far  as  modem  organizations  of  work  are  large  scale, 
they  are  hierarchies  of  power,  into  which  various  occupations 
are  fitted.  The  fact  that  one  takes  orders  as  well  as  gives  them 
does  not  necessarily  decrease  the  positive  gratification  achieved 
through  the  exercise  of  power  on  the  job. 

Status  and  power,  as  features  of  work  gratification,  are  often 
blended;  self-esteem  may  be  based  on  the  social  power  exercised 
in  the  course  of  work;  victory  over  the  will  of  another  may 
greatly  expand  one's  self-estimation.  But  the  very  opposite  may 
also  be  true:  in  an  almost  masochistic  way,  people  may  be  grati- 
fied by  subordination  on  the  job.  We  have  already  seen  how 
ofiBce  women  in  lower  positions  of  authority  are  liable  to  identify 
with  men  in  higher  authority,  transferring  from  prior  family  con- 
nections or  projecting  to  future  family  relations. 

All  four  aspects  of  occupation— skill,  power,  income,  and 
status— must  be  taken  into  account  to  understand  the  meaning 
of  work  and  the  sources  of  its  gratification.  Any  one  of  them  may 
become  the  foremost  aspect  of  the  job,  and  in  various  combina- 


WORK  233 

tions  each  is  usually  in  the  consciousness  of  the  employee.  To 
achieve  and  to  exercise  the  power  and  status  that  higher  income 
entails  may  be  the  very  definition  of  satisfaction  in  work,  and 
this  satisfaction  may  have  nothing  whatsoever  to  do  with  the 
craft  experience  as  the  inherent  need  and  full  development  of 
human  activity. 


5.  The  Morale  of  the  Cheerful  Robots 

The  institutions  in  which  modern  work  is  organized  have  come 
about  by  drift— many  little  schemes  adding  up  to  unexpected 
results— and  by  plan— efforts  paying  off  as  expected.  The  aliena- 
tion of  the  individual  from  the  product  and  the  process  of  his 
work  came  about,  in  the  first  instance,  as  a  result  of  the  drfft 
of  modern  capitalism.  Then,  Frederick  Taylor,  and  other  sci- 
entific managers,  raised  the  division  of  labor  to  the  level  of 
planful  management.  By  centralizing  plans,  as  well  as  introduc- 
ing further  divisions  of  skill,  they  further  routinized  work;  by 
consciously  building  upon  the  drift,  in  factory  and  in  office,  they 
have  carried  further  certain  of  its  efficient  features. 

Twenty  years  ago,  H.  Dubreuil,  a  foreign  observer  of  U.S.  in- 
dustry, could  write  that  Taylor's  'insufficiency'  shows  up  when 
he  comes  to  approach  'the  inner  forces  contained  in  the  worker's 
soul.  .  .'  That  is  no  longer  true.  The  new  ( social )  scientific  man- 
agement begins  precisely  where  Taylor  left  off  or  was  incom- 
plete; students  of  'human  relations  in  industry'  have  studied  not 
lighting  and  clean  toUets,  but  social  cliques  and  good  morale. 
For  in  so  far  as  human  factors  are  involved  in  efficient  and  un- 
troubled production,  the  managerial  demiurge  must  bring  them 
under  control.  So,  in  factory  and  in  office,  the  world  to  be  man- 
aged increasingly  includes  the  social  setting,  the  human  affairs, 
and  the  personality  of  man  as  a  worker. 

Management  effort  to  create  job  enthusiasm  reflects  the  un- 
happy unwillingness  of  employees  to  work  spontaneously  at  their 
routinized  tasks;  it  indicates  recognition  of  the  lack  of  spontane- 
ous will  to  work  for  the  ulterior  ends  available;  it  also  indicates 
that  it  is  more  difficult  to  have  happy  employees  when  the 
chances  to  climb  the  skill  and  social  hierarchies  are  slim.  These 
are  underlying  reasons  why  the  Protestant  ethic,  a  work  com- 


234  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

pulsion,  is  replaced  by  the  conscious  efiForts  of  Personnel  Depart- 
ments to  create  morale.  But  the  present-day  concern  with  em- 
ployee morale  and  work  enthusiasm  has  other  sources  than  the 
meaningless  character  of  much  modern  work.  It  is  also  a  re- 
sponse to  several  decisive  shifts  in  American  society,  particularly 
in  its  higher  business  circles:  the  enormous  scale  and  complexity 
of  modem  business,  its  obviously  vast  and  concentrated  power; 
the  rise  of  successfully  competing  centers  of  loyalty— the  unions- 
over  the  past  dozen  years,  with  their  inevitable  focus  upon  power 
relations  on  the  job;  the  enlargement  of  the  liberal  administrative 
state  at  the  hands  of  politically  successful  New  and  Fair  Deals; 
and  the  hostile  atmosphere  surrounding  business  during  the  big 
slump. 

These  developments  have  caused  a  shift  in  the  outlook  of  cer- 
tain sections  of  the  business  world,  which  in  The  New  Men  of 
Power  I  have  called  the  shift  from  practical  to  sophisticated  con- 
servatism. The  need  to  develop  new  justifications,  and  the  fact 
that  increased  power  has  not  yet  been  publicly  justified,  give 
rise  to  a  groping  for  more  telling  symbols  of  justification  among 
the  more  sophisticated  business  spokesmen,  who  have  felt  them- 
selves to  be  a  small  island  in  a  politically  hostile  sea  of  property- 
less  employees.  Studies  of  Tiuman  relations  in  industry'  are  an 
ideological  part  of  this  groping.  The  managers  are  interested  in 
such  studies  because  of  the  hope  of  lowering  production  costs, 
of  easing  tensions  inside  their  plants,  of  finding  new  symbols  to 
justify  the  concentrated  power  they  exercise  in  modern  society. 

To  secure  and  increase  the  will  to  work,  a  new  ethic  that  en- 
dows work  with  more  than  an  economic  incentive  is  needed. 
During  war,  managers  have  appealed  to  nationalism;  they  have 
appealed  in  the  name  of  the  firm  or  branch  of  the  office  or  fac- 
tory, seeking  to  tap  the  animistic  identifications  of  worker  with 
work-place  and  tools  in  an  effort  to  strengthen  his  identification 
with  the  company.  They  have  repeatedly  written  that  'job  en- 
thusiasm is  good  business,'  that  'job  enthusiasm  is  a  hallmark 
of  the  American  Way.'  But  they  have  not  yet  found  a  really 
sound  ideology. 

What  they  are  after  is  'something  in  the  employee'  outwardly 
manifested  in  a  'mail  must  go  through'  attitude,  'the  "we"  atti- 
tude,' 'spontaneous  discipline,'  'employees  smiling  and  cheerful.' 


WORK  235 

They  want,  for  example,  to  point  out  to  banking  employees  'their 
importance  to  banking  and  banking's  importance  to  the  general 
economy.'  In  conferences  of  management  associations  (1947) 
one  hears:  'There  is  one  thing  more  that  is  wonderful  about  the 
human  body.  Make  the  chemical  in  the  vial  a  little  different  and 
you  have  a  person  who  is  loyal.  He  likes  you,  and  when  mishaps 
come  he  takes  a  lot  from  you  and  the  company,  because  you  have 
been  so  good  to  him;  you  have  changed  the  structure  of  his  blood. 
You  have  to  put  into  his  work  and  environment  the  things  that 
change  the  chemical  that  stimulates  the  action,  so  that  he  is 
loyal  and  productive.  .  .  Somebody  working  under  us  won't 
know  why,  but  .  .  .  when  they  are  asked  where  they  work  and 
why,  they  say  "I  work  with  this  company.  I  like  it  there  and 
my  boss  is  really  one  to  work  with." ' 

The  over-all  formula  of  advice  that  the  new  ideology  of  'human 
relations  in  business'  contains  runs  to  this  effect:  to  make  the 
worker  happy,  efBcient,  and  co-operative,  you  must  make  the 
managers  intelligent,  rational,  knowledgeable.  It  is  the  perspec- 
tive of  a  managerial  elite,  disguised  in  the  pseudo-objective  lan- 
guage of  engineers.  It  is  advice  to  the  personnel  manager  to  relax 
his  authoritative  manner  and  widen  his  manipulative  grip  over 
the  employees  by  understanding  them  better  and  countering  their 
informal  solidarities  against  management  and  exploiting  these 
solidarities  for  smoother  and  less  troublesome  managerial  effi- 
ciency. 

Current  managerial  attempts  to  create  job  enthusiasm,  to  para- 
phrase Marx's  comment  on  Proudhon,  are  attempts  to  conquer 
work  alienation  within  the  bounds  of  work  alienation.  In  the 
meantime,  whatever  satisfaction  alienated  men  gain  from  work 
occurs  within  the  framework  of  alienation;  whatever  satisfaction 
they  gain  from  life  occurs  outside  the  boundaries  of  work;  work 
and  life  are  sharply  split. 

6.  The  Big  Split 

Only  in  the  last  half  century  has  leisure  been  widely  available 
to  the  weary  masses  of  the  big  city.  Before  then,  there  was  leisure 
only  for  those  few  who  were  socially  trained  to  use  and  enjoy 
it;   the  rest  of  the  populace  was   left   on   lower   and   bleaker 


236  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

levels  of  sensibility,  taste,  and  feeling.  Then  as  the  sphere  of 
leisure  was  won  for  more  and  more  of  the  people,  the  techniques 
of  mass  production  were  applied  to  amusement  as  they  had  been 
to  the  sphere  of  work.  The  most  ostensible  feature  of  American 
social  life  today,  and  one  of  the  most  frenzied,  is  its  mass  leisure 
activities.  The  most  important  characteristic  of  all  these  activi- 
ties is  that  they  astonish,  excite,  and  distract  but  they  do  not 
enlarge  reason  or  feeling,  or  allow  spontaneous  dispositions  to 
unfold  creatively. 

What  is  psychologically  important  in  this  shift  to  mass  leisure 
is  that  the  old  middle-class  work  ethic— the  gospel  of  work— has 
been  replaced  in  the  society  of  employees  by  a  leisure  ethic,  and 
this  replacement  has  involved  a  sharp,  almost  absolute  split  be- 
tween work  and  leisure.  Now  work  itself  is  judged  in  terms  of 
leisure  values.  The  sphere  of  leisure  provides  the  standards  by 
which  work  is  judged;  it  lends  to  work  such  meanings  as  work 
has. 

Alienation  in  work  means  that  the  most  alert  hours  of  one's 
life  are  sacrificed  to  the  making  of  money  with  which  to  'live.' 
Alienation  means  boredom  and  the  frustration  of  potentially 
creative  effort,  of  the  productive  sides  of  personality.  It  means 
that  while  men  must  seek  all  values  that  matter  to  them  outside 
of  work,  they  must  be  serious  during  work:  they  may  not  laugh 
or  sing  or  even  talk,  they  must  follow  the  rules  and  not  violate 
the  fetish  of  'the  enterprise.'  In  short,  they  must  be  serious  and 
steady  about  something  that  does  not  mean  anything  to  them, 
and  moreover  during  the  best  hours  of  their  day,  the  best  hours 
of  their  life.  Leisure  time  thus  comes  to  mean  an  unserious  free- 
dom from  the  authoritarian  seriousness  of  the  job. 

The  split  of  work  from  leisure  and  the  greater  importance  of 
leisure  in  the  striving  consciousness  of  modern  man  run  through 
the  whole  fabric  of  twentieth-century  America,  affect  the  mean- 
ingful experiences  of  work,  and  set  popular  goals  and  day- 
dreams. Over  the  last  forty  years,  Leo  Lowenthal  has  shown, 
as  the  'idols  of  work'  have  declined,  the  'idols  of  leisure'  have 
arisen.  Now  th°  selection  of  heroes  for  popular  biography  ap- 
pearing in  mass  magazines  has  shifted  from  business,  profes- 
sional, and  political  figures— successful  in  the  sphere  of  produc- 
tion—to those  successful  in  entertainment,  leisure,  and  consump- 


WORK  237 

lion.  The  movie  star  and  the  baseball  player  have  replaced  the 
industrial  magnate  and  the  political  man.  Today,  the  displayed 
characteristics  of  popular  idols  'can  all  be  integrated  around 
the  concept  of  the  consumer.'  And  the  faculties  of  reflection, 
imagination,  dream,  and  desire,  so  far  as  they  exist,  do  not  now 
move  in  the  sphere  of  concrete,  practical  work  experience. 

Work  is  split  from  the  rest  of  life,  especially  from  the  spheres 
of  conscious  enjoyment;  nevertheless,  most  men  and  many 
women  must  work.  So  work  is  an  unsatisfactory  means  to  ulterior 
ends  lying  somewhere  in  the  sphere  of  leisure.  The  necessity  to 
work  and  the  alienation  from  it  make  up  its  grind,  and  the  more 
grind  there  is,  the  more  need  to  find  relief  in  the  jumpy  or 
dreamy  models  available  in  modern  leisure.  Leisure  contains  all 
good  things  and  all  goals  dreamed  of  and  actively  pursued.  The 
dreariest  part  of  life,  R.  H.  Tawney  remarks,  is  where  and  when 
you  work,  the  gayest  where  and  when  you  consume. 

Each  day  men  sell  little  pieces  of  themselves  in  order  to  try  to 
buy  them  back  each  night  and  week  end  with  the  coin  of  'fun.' 
With  amusement,  with  love,  with  movies,  with  vicarious  inti- 
macy, they  pull  themselves  into  some  sort  of  whole  again,  and 
now  they  are  different  men.  Thus,  the  cycle  of  work  and  leisure 
gives  rise  to  two  quite  different  images  of  self:  the  everyday 
image,  based  upon  work,  and  the  holiday  image,  based  upon 
leisure.  The  holiday  image  is  often  heavily  tinged  with  aspired-to 
and  dreamed-of  features  and  is,  of  course,  fed  by  mass-media  per- 
sonalities and  happenings.  'The  rhythm  of  the  week  end,  with  its 
birth,  its  planned  gaieties,  and  its  announced  end,'  Scott  Fitz- 
gerald wrote,  'followed  the  rhythm  of  Hfe  and  was  a  substitute 
for  it.'  The  week  end,  having  nothing  in  common  with  the  work- 
ing week,  lifts  men  and  women  out  of  the  gray  level  tone  of 
everyday  work  life,  and  forms  a  standard  with  which  the  work- 
ing life  is  contrasted. 

As  the  work  sphere  declines  in  meaning  and  gives  no  inner  di- 
rection and  rhythm  to  life,  so  have  community  and  kinship 
circles  declined  as  ways  of  'fixing  man  into  society.'  In  the  old 
craft  model,  work  sphere  and  family  coincided;  before  the  In- 
dustrial Revolution,  the  home  and  the  workshop  were  one.  To- 
day, this  is  so  only  in  certain  smaller-bourgeois  families,  and 
there  it  is  often  seen  by  the  young  as  repression.  One  result  ol 


238  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

the  division  of  labor  is  to  take  the  breadwinner  out  of  the  home, 
segregating  work  life  and  home  life.  This  has  often  meant  that 
work  becomes  the  means  for  the  maintenance  of  the  home,  and 
the  home  the  means  for  refitting  the  worker  to  go  back  to  work. 
But  with  the  decline  of  the  home  as  the  center  of  psychological 
life  and  the  lowering  of  the  hours  of  work,  the  sphere  of  leisure 
and  amusement  takes  over  the  home's  functions. 

No  longer  is  the  framework  within  which  a  man  lives  fixed  by 
traditional  institutions.  Mass  communications  replace  tradition  as 
a  framework  of  life.  Being  thus  afloat,  the  metropolitan  man  finds 
a  new  anchorage  in  the  spectator  sports,  the  idols  of  the  mass 
media,  and  other  machineries  of  amusement. 

So  the  leisure  sphere— and  the  machinery  of  amusement  in 
terms  of  which  it  is  now  organized— becomes  the  center  of  char- 
acter-forming influences,  of  identification  models:  it  is  what  one 
man  has  in  common  with  another;  it  is  a  continuous  interest.  The 
machinery  of  amusement,  Henry  Durant  remarks,  focuses  atten- 
tion and  desires  upon  'those  aspects  of  our  life  which  are  divorced 
from  work  and  on  people  who  are  significant,  not  in  terms  of 
what  they  have  achieved,  but  in  terms  of  having  money  and  time 
to  spend.' 

The  amusement  of  hollow  people  rests  on  their  own  hollowness 
and  does  not  fill  it  up;  it  does  not  calm  or  relax  them,  as  old 
middle-class  frolics  and  jollification  may  have  done;  it  does  not 
re-create  their  spontaneity  in  work,  as  in  the  craftsman  model. 
Their  leisure  diverts  them  from  the  restless  grind  of  their  work 
by  the  absorbing  grind  of  passive  enjoyment  of  glamour  and 
thrills.  To  modern  man  leisure  is  the  way  to  spend  money,  work 
is  the  way  to  make  it.  When  the  two  compete,  leisure  wins  hands 
down. 


11 


The  Status  Panic 


r  RESTiGE  involves  at  least  two  persons:  one  to  claim  it  and  an- 
other to  honor  the  claim.  The  bases  on  which  various  people 
raise  prestige  claims,  and  the  reasons  others  honor  these  claims, 
include  property  and  birth,  occupation  and  education,  income 
and  power— in  fact  almost  anything  that  may  invidiously  distin- 
guish one  person  from  another.  In  the  status  system  of  a  society 
these  claims  are  organized  as  rules  and  expectations  which  regu- 
late who  successfully  claims  prestige,  from  whoni,  in  what  ways, 
and  on  what  basis.  The  level  of  self-esteem  enjoyed  by  given 
individuals  is  more  or  less  set  by  this  status  system. 

The  extent  to  which  claims  for  prestige  are  honored,  and  by 
whom  they  are  honored,  may  vary  widely.  Some  of  those  from 
whom  an  individual  claims  prestige  may  honor  his  claims,  others 
may  not;  some  deferences  that  are  given  may  express  genuine 
feelings  of  esteem;  others  may  be  expedient  strategies  for  ulterior 
ends.  A  society  may,  in  fact,  contain  many  hierarchies  of  pres- 
tige, each  with  its  own  typical  bases  and  areas  of  bestowal,  or 
one  hierarchy  in  which  everyone  uniformly  Tcnows  his  place'  and 
is  always  in  it.  It  is  in  the  latter  that  prestige  groups  are  most 
likely  to  be  uniform  and  continuous. 

Imagine  a  society  in  which  everyone's  prestige  is  absolutely 
set  and  unambivalent;  every  man's  claims  for  prestige  are  bal- 
anced by  the  prestige  he  receives,  and  both  his  expression  of 
claims  and  the  ways  these  claims  are  honored  by  others  are  set 
forth  in  understood  stereotypes.  Moreover,  the  bases  of  the  claims 
coincide  with  the  reasons  they  are  honored:  those  who  claim 

239 


240  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

prestige  on  the  specific  basis  of  property  or  birth  are  honored 
because  of  their  property  or  birth.  So  the  exact  volume  and  types 
of  deference  expected  between  any  two  individuals  are  always 
known,  expected,  and  given;  and  each  individual's  level  and  type 
of  self-esteem  are  steady  features  of  his  inner  life. 

Now  imagine  the  opposite  society,  in  which  prestige  is  highly 
unstable  and  ambivalent:  the  individual's  claims  are  not  usually 
honored  by  others.  The  way  claims  are  expressed  are  not  under- 
stood or  acknowledged  by  those  from  whom  deference  is  ex- 
pected, and  when  others  do  bestow  prestige,  they  do  so  un- 
clearly.  One  man  claims  prestige  on  the  basis  of  his  income,  but 
even  if  he  is  given  prestige,  it  is  not  because  of  his  income  but 
rather,  for  example,  his  education  or  appearance.  All  the  con- 
trolling devices  by  which  the  volume  and  type  of  deference 
might  be  directed  are  out  of  joint  or  simply  do  not  exist.  So  the 
prestige  system  is  no  system,  but  a  maze  of  misunderstanding,  of 
sudden  frustration  and  sudden  indulgence,  and  the  individual, 
as  his  self-esteem  fluctuates,  is  under  strain  and  full  of  anxiety. 

American  society  in  the  middle  of  the  twentieth  century  does 
not  fit  either  of  these  projections  absolutely,  but  it  seems  fairly 
clear  that  it  is  closer  to  the  unstable  and  ambivalent  model.  This 
is  not  to  say  that  there  is  no  prestige  system  in  the  United  States; 
gi\'en  occupational  levels,  however  caught  in  status  ambivalence, 
do  enjoy  typical  levels  of  prestige.  It  is  to  say,  however,  that  the 
enjoyment  of  prestige  is  often  disturbed  and  uneasy,  that  the 
bases  of  prestige,  the  expressions  of  prestige  claims,  and  the  ways 
these  claims  are  honored,  are  now  subject  to  great  strain,  a  strain 
which  often  puts  men  and  women  in  a  virtual  status  panic, 

1.  White-Collar  Prestige 

The  prestige  position  of  white-collar  employees  has  been  one 
of  the  most  arguable  points  about  them  as  strata,  the  major  point 
to  be  explained  by  those  who  would  locate  them  in  modem  social 
structures.  Although  no  one  dimension  of  stratification  can  be 
adequate,  the  social  esteem  white-collar  employees  have  success- 
fully claimed  is  one  of  their  important  defining  characteristics. 
In  fact,  their  psychology  can  often  be  understood  as  the  psy- 
chology of  prestige  striving.  That  it  is  often  taken  as  their  signal 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  241 

attribute  probably  reflects  the  effort,  which  we  accept,  to  over- 
come the  exclusively  economic  view  of  stratification;  it  also  re- 
flects the  desire,  which  we  reject,  to  encompass  the  entire  group 
with  a  single  slogan. 

White-collar  people's  claims  to  prestige  are  expressed,  as  their 
label  implies,  by  their  style  of  appearance.  Their  occupations 
enable  and  require  them  to  wear  street  clothes  at  work.  Although 
they  may  be  expected  to  dress  somewhat  somberly,  still,  their 
working  attire  is  not  a  uniform,  or  distinct  from  clothing  gen- 
erally suitable  for  street  wear.  The  standardization  and  mass  pro- 
duction of  fashionable  clothing  have  wiped  out  many  distinctions 
that  were  important  up  to  the  twentieth  century,  but  they  have 
not  eliminated  the  distinctions  still  typical  between  white-collar 
and  wage-worker.  The  wage-worker  may  wear  standardized 
street  clothes  off  the  job,  but  the  white-collar  worker  wears  them 
on  the  job  as  well.  This  difference  is  revealed  by  the  clothing 
budgets  of  wage-workers  and  white-collar  people,  especially  of 
girls  and  women.  After  later  adolescence,  women  working  as 
clerks,  compared  with  wage-working  women  of  similar  income, 
spend  a  good  deal  more  on  clothes;  and  the  same  is  true  of  men, 
although  to  a  lesser  extent. 

The  class  position  of  employed  people  depends  on  their 
chances  in  the  labor  market;  their  status  position  depends  on 
their  chances  in  the  commodity  market.  Claims  for  prestige  are 
raised  on  the  basis  of  consumption;  but  since  consumption  is 
limited  by  income,  class  position  and  status  position  intersect. 
At  this  intersection,  clothing  expenditure  is,  of  course,  merely 
an  index,  although  a  very  important  one,  to  the  style  of  appear- 
ance and  the  life-ways  displayed  by  the  white-collar  strata. 

Claims  for  prestige,  however  expressed,  must  be  honored  by 
others,  and,  in  the  end,  must  rest  upon  more  or  less  widely 
acknowledged  bases,  which  distinguish  the  people  of  one  social 
stratum  from  others.  The  pnestige  of  any  stratum,  of  course,  is 
based  upon  its  mutually  recognized  relations  with  other  strata. 
The  'middle  position'  of  white-collar  people  between  inde- 
pendent employers  and  wage-workers,  'a  negative  characteristic— 
rather  than  definite  technical  functions,'  Emil  Lederer  wrote  in 
1912,  'is  the  social  mark  of  the  salaried  employees  and  establishes 


242  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

their  social  character  in  their  own  consciousness  and  in  the  esti- 
mation of  the  community.'  * 

Salaried  employees  have  been  associated  with  entrepreneurs, 
and  later  with  higher-ups  in  the  managerial  cadre,  and  they  have 
borrowed  prestige  from  both.  In  the  latter  nineteenth  century, 
the  foreman,  the  salesclerk,  and  the  office  man  were  widely 
viewed,  and  viewed  themselves,  as  apprentices  or  assistants  to 
old  middle-class  people.  Drawing  upon  their  future  hopes  to  join 
these  ranks,  they  were  able  to  borrow  the  prestige  of  the  people 
for  whom  they  worked,  and  with  whom  they  were  in  close,  often 
personal,  contact.  White-collar  people  intermarried  with  mem- 
bers of  the  old  middle  class  and  enjoyed  common  social  activi- 
ties; in  many  cases  the  salaried  man  represented  the  entrepre- 
neur to  the  public  and  was  recruited  from  the  same  social  levels— 
mainly,  the  old  rural  middle  class.  All  this— descent,  association, 
and  expectation— made  it  possible  for  earlier  salaried  employees 
to  borrow  status  from  the  old  middle  class. 

Today,  in  big  city  as  well  as  small  town,  white-collar  workers 
continue  to  borrow  such  prestige.  It  is  true  that  in  larger  con- 
cerns personal  contacts  with  old  middle-class  entrepreneurs  have 
been  superseded  by  impersonal  contacts  with  the  lower  rungs  of 
the  new  managerial  cadre.  Still,  all  white-collar  people  do  not 
lack  personal  contact  with  employers;  not  all  of  them  are  em- 
ployed in  the  big  lay-out,  which,  in  many  areas,  is  as  yet  the 
model  of  the  future  more  than  of  present  reality.  The  general 
images  of  the  white-collar  people,  in  terms  of  which  they  are 
often  able  to  cash  in  claims  for  prestige,  are  drawn  from  present 
reality.  Moreover,  even  in  the  big  hierarchies,  white-collar  people 
often  have  more  contact— and  usually  feel  that  they  do— with 
higher-ups  than  do  factory  workers. 

The  prestige  cleavage  between  'the  shop'  and  'the  front  office' 
often  seems  to  exist  quite  independently  of  the  low  income  and 
routine  character  of  many  front-office  jobs  and  the  high  pay  and 
skills  of  jobs  in  the  shop.  For  orders  and  pay  checks  come  from 

*  According  to  a  recent  National  Opinion  Research  rating,  on  a  scale 
running  from  90.8  for  government  officials  and  80.6  for  professionals 
and  semi-professionals  (both  free  and  salaried)  to  45.8  for  non-farm 
laborers,  the  whole  group  of  'clerical,  sales,  and  kindred  workers'  stand 
at  68.2,  about  on  a  par  with  the  'craftsmen,  foremen,  and  kindred 
workers.' 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  243 

the  office  and  are  associated  with  it;  and  those  who  are  somehow 
of  it  are  endowed  with  some  of  the  prestige  that  attends  its  func- 
tion in  the  life  of  the  wage-worker.  The  tendency  of  white-collar 
people  to  borrow  status  from  higher  elements  is  so  strong  that 
it  has  carried  over  to  all  social  contacts  and  features  of  the  work- 
place. 

Salespeople  in  department  stores,  as  we  have  already  seen,  fre- 
quently attempt,  although  often  unsuccessfully,  to  borrow  pres- 
tige from  their  contact  with  customers,  and  to  cash  it  in  among 
work  colleagues  as  well  as  friends  off  the  job.  In  the  big  city  the 
girl  who  works  on  34th  Street  cannot  successfully  claim  as  much 
prestige  a^  the  one  who  works  on  Fifth  Avenue  or  57th  Street. 
Writes  one  observer:  'A  salesgirl  in  Bonwit  Teller's  .  .  .  will  act 
and  feel  different  from  a  salesgirl  at  Macy's.  She  will  be  more 
gracious,  more  helpful,  more  charming  .  .  .  but  at  the  same 
time  she  will  have  an  air  of  dignity  and  distance  about  her,  an 
air  of  distinction,  that  implies,  "I  am  more  important  than  you 
because  my  customers  come  from  Park  Avenue." ' 

It  is  usually  possible  to  know  the  prestige  of  salespeople  in 
department  stores  in  terms  of  the  commodities  they  handle, 
ranked  according  to  the  'expensiveness'  of  the  people  who  typi- 
cally buy  them.  Prestige  may  be  borrowed  directly  from  the  com- 
modities themselves,  although  this  is  not  as  likely  as  borrowing 
from  the  type  of  customer. 

If  white-collar  relations  with  supervisors  and  higher-ups,  with 
customers  or  clients,  become  so  impersonal  as  seriously  to  limit 
borrowing  prestige  from  them,  prestige  is  then  often  borrowed 
from  the  firm  or  the  company  itself.  The  fetishism  of  the  enter- 
prise, and  identification  with  the  firm,  are  often  as  relevant  for 
the  white-collar  hirelings  as  for  the  managers.  This  identification 
may  be  implemented  by  the  fact  that  the  work  itself,  as  a  set  of 
activities,  offers  little  chance  for  external  prestige  claims  and  in- 
ternal self-esteem.  So  the  work  one  does  is  buried  in  the  name  of 
the  firm.  The  typist  or  the  salesgirl  does  not  think  of  herself  in 
terms  of  what  she  does,  but  as  being  with  Saks'  or  'working 
at  Time.'  A  $38-a-week  clerk  in  a  chrome  and  mahogany  setting 
in  Radio  City  will  often  successfully  raise  higher  claims  for  pres- 
tige than  a  $50-a-week  stenographer  in  a  small,  dingy  office  on 
Seventh  Avenue.  Help-Wanted  ads  ('Beautifully  Furnished  Of- 


244  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

fice  in  Rockefeller  Center/  'Large  Nation-wide  Concern/  'OflBces 
located  on  32nd  floor  of  Empire  State  Building' )  reveal  conscious 
appeal  to  the  status  striving  of  the  office  worker.  Such  positions 
are  often  easier  to  fill,  not  because  of  higher  salary  and  more 
rapid  promotion,  but  because  of  the  prestige  of  the  firm's  name 
or  location. 

In  identifying  with  a  firm,  the  young  executive  can  sometimes 
line  up  his  career  expectations  with  it,  and  so  identify  his  own 
future  with  that  of  the  firm's.  But  lower  down  the  ranks,  the 
identification  has  more  to  do  with  security  and  prestige  than 
with  expectations  of  success.  In  either  case,  of  course,  such  feel- 
ings can  be  exploited  in  the  interests  of  business  loyalties. 

In  the  impersonal  white-collar  hierarchies,  employees  often  at- 
tempt to  personalize  their  surroundings  in  order  to  identify  with 
them  more  closely  and  draw  prestige  therefrom.  In  the  personnel 
literature,  there  are  many  illustrations  of  an  often  pathetic  striv- 
ing for  a  sense  of  importance— for  example,  when  a  girl's  chair  is 
taken  from  her  and  she  is  given  one  thought  more  convenient 
for  her  work,  her  production  drops.  When  questioned,  she  asks, 
'Why  are  you  picking  on  me?'  and  explains  that  she  had  used  the 
old  chair  for  five  years  and  it  had  her  name  plate  on  it.  When 
the  name  plate  is  transferred  to  the  new  chair,  it  is  explained, 
her  attitude  changes,  and  her  production  comes  up  to  normal. 
Similar  observations  have  been  made  in  connection  with  the  ar- 
rangement of  desks  in  an  oflBce,  in  which,  unknown  to  manage- 
ment, the  old  pattern  had  been  in  terms  of  seniority.  Women  are 
probably  more  alert  to  these  prestige  borrowings  than  men.  The 
first  consideration  of  one  large  group  of  women  seeking  employ- 
ment had  to  do  with  'the  office  environment,'  the  state  of  the 
equipment,  the  appearance  of  the  place,  the  'class  of  people' 
working  there.  Periodical  salary  increases  and  initial  salary  were 
both  ranked  below  such  considerations.  Of  course,  such  prestige 
matters  often  involve  the  desire  to  be  available  on  a  market  for 
more  marriageable  males,  yet  the  material  signs  of  the  status  en- 
vironment are  in  themselves  crucial  to  the  white-collar  sense  of 
importance. 

That  white-collar  work  requires  more  mental  capacity  and  less 
muscular  effort  than  wage  work  has  been  a  standard,  historical 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  245 

basis  for  prestige  claims.  In  the  office,  as  we  have  seen,  white- 
collar  technology  and  social  rationalization  have  definitely  les- 
sened technical  differences  between  white-collar  and  factory 
work.  Many  white-collar  people  now  operate  light  machinery  at 
a  pace  and  under  conditions  that  are  quite  similar  to  those  of 
light  industrial  operations,  even  if  they  do  so  while  wearing  street 
clothes  rather  than  overalls.  Still,  the  variety  of  operations  and 
the  degree  of  autonomous  decision  are  taken  as  bases  of  white- 
collar  prestige.  And  it  is  true  that  in  thousands  of  offices  and 
salesrooms,  the  receptionist,  the  salesgirl,  the  general  secretary, 
and  even  the  typist  seems  to  perform  a  wide  variety  of  different 
operations  at  her  own  pace  and  according  to  her  own  decisions. 

The  time  required  to  learn  white-collar  skills  and  how  they  are 
learned  has  been  an  important  basis  of  their  prestige,  even 
though  as  white-collar  work  is  rationalized  the  time  needed  to 
acquire  the  necessary  skills  decreases.  Some  80  per  cent  of  the 
people  at  "work,  it  is  frequently  estimated,  now  perform  work 
that  can  be  learned  in  less  than  three  months.  Accompanying 
this  rationalization  of  the  work  process,  a  stratum  of  highly 
skilled  experts  has  arisen.  Over  the  whole  society,  this  stratum 
is  popularly,  even  if  erroneously,  associated  with  'white-collar' 
work,  while  the  semi-skilled  is  associated  with  wage  work.  So 
those  white-collar  workers  who  are  in  fact  quite  unskilled  and 
routinized  still  borrow  from  the  prestige  of  the  skills. 

More  crucially,  perhaps,  than  type  of  skill  is  the  fact  that  many 
white-collar  skills  are  still  acquired  at  school  rather  than  on  the 
job.  The  two  ways  of  learning  working  skills  that  carry  most 
prestige  have  been  combined  in  many  white-collar  areas,  whereas 
neither  is  now  prevalent  among  wage-workers.  Apprenticeship, 
involving  close  contact  with  entrepreneurs  or  managerial  levels, 
continued  in  white-collar  occupations  after  they  had  ceased  to 
exist  in  wage  work;  then,  formal  education,  in  high  school  and 
'business  college,'  became  the  typical  white-collar  way. 

The  shift  from  small  independent  property  to  dependent  occu- 
pations greatly  increases  the  weight  of  formal  education  in  deter- 
mining life  conditions.  For  the  new  middle  class,  education  has 
replaced  property  as  the  insurance  of  social  position.  The  saving 
and  sacrifice  of  the  new  middle  class  to  insure  a  'good  education' 
for  the  child  replace  the  saving  and  sacrffice  of  the  old  middle 


246  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

class  to  insure  that  the  child  may  inherit  'the  good  property'  with 
which  to  earn  his  livelihood.  The  inheritance  of  occupational 
ambition,  and  of  the  education  that  is  its  condition,  replaces  the 
inheritance  of  property. 

To  acquire  some  white-collar  skills  requires  twenty  years  of 
formal  and  expensive  education;  others  may  be  learned  in  one 
day,  and  are  more  efficiently  performed  by  those  with  little  edu- 
cation. For  some  white-collar  jobs,  people  above  the  grammar- 
school  level  are  not  wanted,  for  fear  boredom  would  lead  to  slow- 
down by  frustration;  for  others,  only  the  Ph.D.  is  allowed  to  go 
to  work.  But  the  educational  center  around  which  the  white- 
collar  worlds  revolve  is  the  high  school. 

In  1890,  only  7  out  of  every  100  boys  and  girls  between  14  and 
17  were  enrolled  in  high  schools;  by  1940,  73  out  of  every  100 
were.  During  these  fifty  years,  the  number  of  children  of  this  age 
increased  some  82  per  cent,  the  number  of  high-school  enroll- 
ments, 1,888  per  cent.  The  white-collar  people,  the  great  deposi- 
tory of  the  High-School  Culture  implanted  in  U.S.  youth,  have 
completed  an  average  of  12.4  years  of  school,  compared  with  the 
free  enterprisers'  8.4  and  the  wage- workers'  8.2  years.*  On  every 
occupational  level,  white-collar  men  and  women  are  better  edu- 
cated, except  for  the  single  one  of  independent  professionals, 
who,  of  course,  lead  educationally  with  16.4  years  of  schooling. 
Many  a  clerk  in  a  small  ofiice  has  a  less  educated,  although  more 
experienced,  boss;  many  a  salesclerk  in  a  small  store  is  super- 
vised by  a  higher-up  not  so  well  educated  as  she.  Of  course,  the 
higher  educational  level  of  the  white-collar  people  in  part  reflects 
their  youthfulness;  being  younger,  they  have  had  more  oppor- 
tunities for  education.  But  they  have  availed  themselves  of  it; 
for  in  the  white-collar  pyramids  education  has  'paid  off';  it  has 
been  a  source  of  cash  and  a  means  of  ascent.  Here  Tcnowledge,' 
although  not  power,  has  been  a  basis  for  prestige,  f 

•  The  breakdown  by  detailed  groups  (median  years  of  school  com- 
pleted, 1940):  farmers,  7.6  years;  businessmen,  9.9;  free  professionals, 
16.4;  managers,  10.8;  salaried  professionals,  14.9;  salespeople,  12.1; 
oflBce  workers,  12.3;  skilled  workers,  8.5;  semi-skilled,  8.4;  unskilled, 
8.2;  rural  workers,  7.3. 

f  No  doubt  some  prestige  accrues  to  white-collar  people  because  of 
their  youthfulness,  first  because  if  they  are  young  they  may,  in  the 
American  ethos,  still  be  hopefully  seen  as  having  more  to  win;  and  sec- 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  247 

Even  today,  white-collar  occupations  contain  the  highest  gen- 
eral average  of  educated  people;  but  twenty-five  years  ago  this 
was  much  more  strongly  the  case;  in  large  part,  white-collar 
people  monopolized  intermediate  and  higher  education.  Twenty- 
five  years  ahead  it  will  not  necessarily  be  the  case;  in  fact,  all 
trends  point  to  the  continued  narrowing  of  the  educational  gap 
between  white-collar  and  wage-worker. 

Fifty  years  ago  the  general  labor  market  was  almost  entirely 
composed  of  grade-school  graduates;  today  of  high-school  gradu- 
ates; by  the  early  'fifties  9^  million  college-educated  youth  wdll 
be  in  the  labor  market.  Most  of  them  will  reach  for  the  white- 
collar  job,  and  many  of  them  will  not  find  routinized  white-collar 
jobs  a  challenge,  for,  as  H.  K.  Tootle  has  estimated  for  an  office- 
management  association,  'educated  youth  is  being  channeled  into 
business  faster  than  job  satisfactions  can  be  developed  for  it.  .  . 
As  there  are  not  enough  stimulating  jobs  for  the  hordes  of  college 
graduates  we  see  descending  upon  us  in  the  years  to  come  hke 
swarms  of  hungry  locusts,  they  will  have  to  take  jobs  that  satisfy, 
or  perhaps  even  now  do  not  satisfy,  the  high-school  graduate.' 

As  the  general  educational  level  rises,  the  level  of  education 
required  or  advisable  for  many  white-collar  jobs  falls.  In  the  early 
'twenties,  personnel  men  said:  'I  think  it  has  become  a  principle 
with  the  majority  of  our  progressive  offices  that  they  will  not  take 
into  the  office  any  person  or  candidate  who  has  not  had  the 
benefit  of  at  least  a  high-school  education.'  But  soon  they  began 
to  say  that  too  much  education  was  not  advisable  for  many  white- 
collar  jobs.  In  fact,  the  educated  intelligence  has  become  penal- 
ized in  routinized  work,  where  the  search  is  for  those  who  are 
less  easily  bored  and  hence  more  cheerfully  efficient.  'When  you 
employ  2600  clerks,'  says  one  personnel  supervisor,  'you  don't 
want  all  college  people.  I  much  prefer  the  young  fellow  who  is 
fresh  from  high  school,  or  graduated  from  normal  school,  and 
who  is  full  of  pep  and  ambition,  and  wants  to  get  ahead.  We 
could  not  use  college  men  in  many  of  our  positions.'  Education, 
in  short,  comes  to  be  viewed  as  a  sort  of  frustrating  trap. 

The  rationalization  of  office  and  store  undermines  the  special 
skills  based  on  experience  and  education.  It  makes  the  employee 

ondly,  because  youth  itself  often  carries  prestige,  a  prestige  that  is 
much  advertised  by  displayed  models  and  expected  efficiency. 


248  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

easy  to  replace  by  shortening  the  training  he  needs;  it  weakens 
not  only  his  bargaining  power  but  his  prestige.  It  opens  white- 
collar  positions  to  people  with  less  education,  thus  destroying  the 
educational  prestige  of  white-collar  work,  for  there  is  no  inherent 
prestige  attached  to  the  nature  of  any  work;  it  is,  Hans  Speier 
remarks,  the  esteem  the  people  doing  it  enjoy  that  often  lends 
prestige  to  the  work  itself.  In  so  far  as  white-collar  workers  base 
their  claims  for  external  prestige  and  their  own  self-esteem  upon 
educated  skills,  they  open  themselves  to  a  precarious  psychologi- 
cal life. 

In  the  United  States,  white-collar  people  have  been  able  to 
claim  higher  prestige  than  wage-workers  because  of  racial,  but 
to  a  greater  extent  and  in  a  more  direct  way,  national  origin. 

The  number  of  Negroes  in  white-collar  jobs  is  negligible,  but 
especially  since  World  War  I,  considerable  numbers  have  worked 
in  unskilled  and  semi-skilled  factory  jobs.  The  new  middle  class 
contains  a  greater  proportion  of  white  people  than  any  other  oc- 
cupational stratum:  in  1940,  some  99.5  per  cent  of  the  white- 
collar,  compared  with  90  per  cent  of  free  enterprisers,  87  per  cent 
of  urban  wage-workers,  and  74  per  cent  of  rural  workers. 

Nativity  and  immigration  differences  between  white-collar  and 
wage-work  are  probably  more  direct  bases  of  white-collar  pres- 
tige. When  the  'race  peril'  literature  was  popular,  the  textbook 
myth  about  the  lowly  character  of  newer  immigrants  was  also 
widespread.  Most  of  the  major  American  historians  of  the  period 
between  1875  and  1925  belligerently  declared  the  superiority  of 
"Anglo-Saxon'  stock,  concludes  Edward  Saveth.  Being  of  old 
stock  themselves,  their  'conception  of  the  immigrant  reflected, 
in  some  degree,  their  feeling  that  the  newcomer  somehow  con- 
stituted a  threat  to  what  they  hold  dear,  ideologically  and  mate- 
rially. .  .'  Mass  as  well  as  academic  publicity  reflected  and 
spread  the  fact  of  prestige  distinctions  between  immigrant  and 
native. 

If  the  'American'  stature  of  a  group  may  be  judged  by  the 
proportion  of  its  native-born  members,  white-collar  workers  have 
been  the  most  American  of  all  occupational  strata.  In  1930,  after 
mass  immigration  had  been  stopped,  only  9  per  cent  of  the  white 
population  of  the  new  middle  class  were  foreign-born,  compared 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  249 

to.  16  per  cent  of  the  free  enterprisers  and  21  per  cent  of  the 
wage- workers.  But  now  there  is  no  bulk  immigration:  soon,  vir- 
tually all  Americans  will  be  American-born  of  American-borr 
parents.  Time  will  not  automatically  erase  the  prestige  cleavages 
based  on  descent,  but,  for  most  white-collar-  and  wage-workers, 
as  they  become  more  similar  in  origin,  it  probably  will.  In  the 
meantime,  nativity  differences  still  underlie  the  prestige  claims 
of  white-collar  groups. 

Every  basis  on  which  the  prestige  claims  of  the  bulk  of  the 
white-collar  employees  have  historically  rested  has  been  declin- 
ing in  firmness  and  stability:  the  rationalization  and  down-grad- 
ing of  the  work  operations  themselves  and  hence  the  lessening 
importance  of  education  and  experience  in  acquiring  white-collar 
skills;  the  leveling  down  of  white-collar  and  the  raising  of  wage- 
worker  incomes,  so  that  the  differences  between  them  are  de- 
cidedly less  than  they  once  were;  the  increased  size  of  the  white- 
collar  labor  market,  as  more  people  from  lower  ranks  receive 
high-school  educations,  so  that  any  monopoly  of  formal  training, 
adequate  to  these  jobs  is  no  longer  possible;  the  decline  in  the 
proportion  of  people  of  immigrant  origin  and  the  consequent  nar- 
rowing of  nativity  differences  between  white-collar  and  wage- 
worker;  the  increased  participation  of  white-collar  people,  alone: 
with  wage-workers,  in  unemployment;  and  the  increased  eco- 
nomic and  public  power  of  wage-workers  because  of  their  union 
strength,  as  compared  with  that  of  white-collar  workers. 

All  these  tendencies  for  white-collar  occupations  to  sink  in 
prestige  rest  upon  the  numerical  enlargement  of  the  white-collar 
strata  and  the  increase  in  prestige  which  the  wage-workers  have 
enjoyed.  If  everybody  belongs  to  the  fraternity,  nobody  gets  any 
prestige  from  belonging.  As  the  white-collar  strata  have  expanded 
they  have  included  more  offspring  of  wage-worker  origin;  more- 
over, in  so  far  as  their  prestige  has  rested  upon  their  sharing  the 
authority  of  those  in  charge  of  the  enterprise,  that  authority  has 
itself  lost  much  of  its  prestige,  having  been  successfully  chal- 
lenged at  many  points  by  unionized  wage-workers. 

Although  trends  should  not  be  confused  with  accomplished 
facts,  it  is  clear  that  many  trends  point  to  a  'status  proletarianiza- 
tion' of  white-collar  strata. 


250  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

2.  The  Smaller  City 

lo  understand  the  prestige  of  white-collar  people  we  must 
examine  the  kinds  of  people  among  whom  they  successfully  raise 
claims  for  prestige.  For  different  groups  do  not  honor  white-collar 
claims  to  the  same  extent;  in  fact,  their  estimates  often  clash,  and 
there  is  much  ambivalence  about  white-collar  prestige. 

White-collar  workers  are  city  people;  in  the  smaller  cities,  they 
live  on  the  right  side  of  the  tracks  and  work  'uptown';  in  the 
larger  cities  they  often  live  in  suburbs  and  work  'downtown.' 
The  city  is  their  milieu  and  they  are  shaped  by  its  mass  ways. 
As  the  city  has  expanded,  more  and  more  of  its  inhabitants  have 
been  white-collar  people.  And  it  is  in  cities  of  differing  size  that 
they  must  raise  their  claims  for  prestige. 

In  the  smaller  cities,  lower  classes  sometimes  use  the  term 
"white  collar'  to  refer  to  everyone  above  themselves.  Sometimes 
their  attitude  is  that  white-collar  people  are  'pencil  pushers'  who 
'sit  around  and  don't  work  and  figure  out  ways  of  keeping  wages 
cheap';  and  sometimes  it  is  that  'the  clerks  are  very  essential. 
They  are  the  ones  who  keep  the  ball  rolling  for  the  other  guy. 
We  would  be  lost  if  we  didn't  have  the  clerks.'  The  upper  classes, 
on  the  other  hand,  never  acknowledge  white-collar  people  as  of 
the  upper  levels  and  sometimes  even  place  them  with  'the  labor- 
ers.' An  upper-class  man  in  a  city  of  60,000,  for  instance,  says: 
'Next  after  retailers,  I  would  put  the  policemen,  firemen,  the 
average  factory  worker  and  the  white-collar  clerks.  .  .  I've  lived 
in  this  town  all  my  life  and  come  to  the  bank  every  day  but  Sun- 
day and  I  can't  name  five  clerks  downtown  I  know.' 

This  situation  of  white-collar  prestige  in  the  smaller  city  is  in 
part  due  to  the  fact  that  white-collar  occupations  are  divided  into 
higher  and  lower,  in  terms  of  almost  every  basis  on  which  pres- 
tige claims  might  be  made:  social  origin,  occupational  history, 
income,  education.  Now,  the  images  held  of  the  white-collar 
people  by  upper-class  groups  seem  to  be  derived,  by  and  large, 
from  the  lower  groups  of  these  occupations,  the  'clerk'  and  the 
'salesperson.'  When  upper-class  individuals  do  focus  upon  higher- 
income  salesmen,  or  professional  and  managerial  employees,  they 
think  of  them  as  part  of  'business'  rather  than  as  part  of  'white 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  251 

collar.'  Members  of  lower  classes,  on  the  other  hand,  tend  to 
blend  white  collar,  both  higher  and  lower,  into  business  and  to 
make  little  distinction  between  them. 

The  ambiguous  prestige  of  the  smaller  businessman  in  these 
smaller  cities  is  explained,  in  part,  by  the  'power'  ascribed  to  him 
by  lower  groups  but  denied  to  him  by  the  upper.  In  so  far  as 
power  is  concerned,  the  ambiguous  status  position  of  the  white- 
collar  worker  rests  less  upon  complications  in  his  power  position 
than  upon  his  lack  of  any  power.  White-collar  employees  have 
no  leaders  active  as  their  representatives  in  civic  efforts;  they 
are  not  represented  as  a  stratum  in  the  councils;  they  have  no 
autonomous  organizations  through  which  to  strive  for  political 
and  civic  ends;  they  are  seldom,  if  ever,  in  the  publicity  spot- 
light. No  articulate  leaders  appeal  directly  to  them,  or  draw 
strength  from  their  support.  In  the  organized  power  of  the  mid- 
dle-sized city,  there  is  no  autonomous  white-collar  unit. 

The  few  organizations  in  which  white-collar  employees  are 
sometimes  predominant— the  Business  and  Professional  Women's 
Clubs,  the  Junior  Chamber  of  Commerce,  and  the  YWCA— are  so 
tied  in  with  business  groups  that  they  have  little  or  no  autonomy. 
Socially,  the  lower  white-collar  people  are  usually  on  'the  Elk 
level,'  the  higher  in  the  No.  2  or  3  social  club;  in  both  they  are 
part  of  a  'middle-class  mingling'  pattern.  They  are  'led,'  if  at  all, 
by  higher-income  salesmen  and  other  'contact  people,'  who  are 
themselves  identified  with  'business,'  and  whose  activities  thus 
lend  prestige  to  businessmen  rather  than  to  white-collar  people. 

Even  in  the  smaller  cities,  then,  there  is  no  homogeneous  social 
arena  in  which  white-collar  prestige  is  uniformly  honored;  in  the 
big  city  this  fact  is  the  key  to  the  character  of  white-collar 
prestige. 

3.  The  Metropolis 

The  rise  of  the  big  city  has  modified  the  prestige  structure  of 
modern  society:  it  has  greatly  enlarged  the  social  areas  with  ref- 
erence to  which  prestige  is  claimed;  it  has  split  the  individual 
from  easily  identifiable  groups  in  which  he  might  claim  prestige 
and  in  which  his  claims  might  be  acknowledged;  it  has  given  rise 
to  many  diverse,  segregated  areas  in  each  of  which  the  individual 


252  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

may  advance  claims;  and  it  has  made  these  areas  impersonal. 
The  prestige  market  of  the  big  city  is  often  a  market  of  strangers, 
a  milieu  where  contacts  having  relevance  to  prestige  are  often 
transitory  and  fleeting. 

The  neighbors  of  the  small-town  man  know  much  of  what  is 
to  be  known  about  him.  The  metropolitan  man  is  a  temporary 
focus  of  heterogeneous  circles  of  casual  acquaintances,  rather 
than  a  fixed  center  of  a  few  well-known  groups.  So  personal 
snoopiness  is  replaced  by  formal  indifference;  one  has  contacts, 
rather  than  relations,  and  these  contacts  are  shorter-hved  and 
more  superficial.  'The  more  people  one  knows  the  easier  it  be- 
comes to  replace  them.' 

The  metropolitan  man's  biography  is  often  unknown,  his  past 
apparent  only  to  very  limited  groups,  so  the  basis  of  his  status 
is  often  hidden  and  ambivalent,  revealed  only  in  the  fast-chang- 
ing appearances  of  his  mobile,  anonymous  existence.  Intimacy 
and  the  personal  touch,  no  longer  intrinsic  to  his  way  of  life, 
are  often  contrived  devices  of  impersonal  manipulation.  Rather 
than  cohesion  there  is  uniformity,  rather  than  descent  or  tradi- 
tion, interests.  Physically  close,  but  socially  distant,  human  rela- 
tions become  at  once  intense  and  impersonal— and  in  every  detail, 
pecuniary. 

Apart  from  educational  opportimities,  the  status  of  most  mid- 
dle- and  working-class  people  becomes  individualized,  one  gen- 
eration cut  off  from  the  other.  Among  the  propertyless,  status 
must  be  won  anew  by  each  generation.  The  small  businessman's 
sons  or  the  farmer's  might  look  forward  to  the  inheritance  of  a 
more  or  less  secure  property  as  a  basis  for  their  status;  the  floor- 
walker's sons  or  the  assistant  manager's  cannot  expect  to  inherit 
such  family  position. 

The  more  transparent  lives  of  people  in  smaller  cities  permit 
status  bases,  such  as  social  origin,  to  be  more  readily  transferred 
to  various  occupational  levels.  The  nature  of  the  opaque  contacts 
characteristic  of  big  city  life  make  this  difficult:  members  of  one 
occupational  level  may  see  or  even  contact  members  of  others, 
but  usually  in  a  stereotyped  rather  than  in  a  personal  manner. 
They  meet  on  impersonal  terms  and  then  retire  into  their  socially 
insulated  personal  lives.  In  smaller  cities  and  smaller  enterprises. 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  253 

the  status  lines  between  white-collar  and  wage-worker  are,  per- 
haps, drawn  most  clearly.  In  metropolitan  areas  white-collar 
people  seldom  contact  wage-workers;  the  physical  lay-out  of  the 
city,  the  segregation  of  routes  of  travel  for  different  occupations 
often  restrict  people  to  separate  circles  of  acquaintances. 

The  mass  media,  primarily  movies  and  radio,  have  further  en- 
larged the  whole  prestige  area  and  the  means  of  status  expres- 
sion. In  the  media  the  life  styles  of  the  top  levels  are  displayed 
to  the  bottom  in  a  way  and  to  an  extent  not  previously  the  case. 

Some  communication  system  is  needed  to  cover  any  prestige 
area,  and  in  modern  times,  with  the  enlargement  of  prestige 
areas,  TDcing  seen'  in  the  formal  media  is  taken  as  a  basis  of  status 
claims  as  well  as  a  cashing  of  them.  When  national  prestige  was 
focused  in  local  society,  local  newspapers  used  to  be  the  princi- 
pal media  involved  in  the  prestige  of  local  society  matrons. 
But  since  the  1920's,  radio  and  especially  motion  pictures  and 
TV  have  supplemented  newspapers  and  have  created  a  national 
status  market  in  which  the  movie  star,  a  status  type  who  sud- 
denly acquires  liquid  assets  and  a  lavish  style  of  life  has  re- 
placed the  local  society  matron.  The  deciders  and  originators 
in  matters  of  the  highest  fashion  and  style  of  life  have  definitely 
passed  from  the  old  families  of  Boston,  Philadelphia,  Baltimore, 
and  Newport  to  the  stars  of  Hollywood  and  Radio  City. 

'In  Newport,  and  on  Fifth  Avenue,'  Lloyd  Morris  has  observed, 
'wealth  had  been  a  weapon  indispensable  to  those  who  fought  to 
win  social  power.  In  Hollywood,  social  prestige  was  an  instru- 
ment essential  to  those  determined  to  win  wealth.'  The  society 
reporters  of  all  the  eastern  cities  combined  cannot  compete  with 
the  several  hundred  journalists  who  cover  Hollywood.  Two  dozen 
magazines  are  devoted  to  the  film  center;  Louella  Parsons  reaches 
thirty  million  readers.  Eighteen  thousand  movie  houses  are  vis- 
ited by  ninety  million  people  each  week.  The  heterogeneous 
public  appears  avid  for  intimate  details  of  the  Hollywood  elite. 
And  the  movies,  which  made  them  an  elite,  are  set  up  to  supply 
new  images  of  them  continuously.  Not  the  society  matron,  but 
the  movie  star  becomes  the  model  for  the  office  girl. 

The  rich  of  previous  eras  could  not  so  readily  be  known  by  the 
public,  the  way  they  lived  being  known  only  by  hearsay  and 


254  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

glimpses  through  curtained  windows.  But  by  the  1920's  in 
America  a  democracy  of  status  vision  had  come  about;  the  area 
of  prestige  was  truly  national;  now  the  bottom  could  see  the  top 
—at  least  that  version  of  it  that  was  put  on  display.  It  did  not 
matter  if  this  top  was  sometimes  contrived  and  often  a  cloak. 
It  did  not  matter  if  the  real  top  was  even  more  secluded  and 
unseen  than  before.  For  those  on  the  bottom,  the  top  presented 
was  real  and  it  was  dazzling. 

The  enlargement  and  animation,  the  anonymity  and  the  transi- 
toriness,  the  faster  turnover  and  the  increased  visibility  of  the 
top,  filling  the  individual's  vision  with  a  series  of  big  close-ups— 
these  changes  have  been  paralleled  by  less  noticed  but  equally 
intense  changes  in  the  prestige  dynamics  of  the  middle  and 
lower  strata. 


4.   The  Status  Panic 

The  historic  bases  of  white-collar  prestige  are  now  infirm;  the 
areas  in  which  white-collar  people  must  seek  to  have  their  claims 
honored  are  agitated.  Both  sides  of  the  situation  in  which  they 
are  caught  impel  them  to  emphasize  prestige  and  often  to  engage 
in  a  great  striving  for  its  symbols.  In  this,  three  mechanisms  seem 
to  be  operating: 

I.  In  the  white-collar  hierarchies,  as  we  have  seen,  individuals 
are  often  segregated  by  minute  gradations  of  rank,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  subject  to  a  fragmentation  of  skill.  This  bureaucratiza- 
tion often  breaks  up  the  occupational  bases  of  their  prestige. 
Since  the  individual  may  seize  upon  minute  distinctions  as  bases 
for  status,  these  distinctions  operate  against  any  status  solidarity 
among  the  mass  of  employees,  often  lead  to  status  estrangement 
from  work  associates,  and  to  increased  status  competition.  The 
employees  are  thus  further  alienated  from  work,  for,  in  striving 
for  the  next  rank,  they  come  to  anticipate  identification  with  it, 
so  that  now  they  are  not  really  in  their  places.  Like  money,  status 
that  is  exterior  to  one's  present  work  does  not  lead  to  intrinsic 
work  gratification.  Only  if  present  work  leads  to  the  anticipated 
goal  by  a  progression  of  skills,  and  is  thus  given  meaning,  will 
status  aspirations  not  alienate  the  worker.  Status  ascent  within 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  255 

the  hierarchy  is  a  kind  of  illusionary  success,  for  it  does  not 
necessarily  increase  income  or  the  chance  to  learn  superior  skills. 
Above  all,  the  hierarchy  is  often  accompanied  by  a  delirium  for 
status  merely  because  of  its  authoritarian  shape:  as  Karl  Mann- 
heim has  observed,  people  who  are  dependent  for  everything, 
including  images  of  themselves,  upon  place  in  an  authoritarian 
hierarchy,  will  all  the  more  frantically  cling  to  claims  of  status. 

The  sharp  split  of  residence  from  work  place,  characteristic  of 
urban  life  since  the  Industrial  Revolution,  is  most  clearly  mani- 
fested in  the  big  city  suburb,  where  work  associates  are  formally 
segregated  from  neighbors.  This  means  that  the  subordinate  may 
compete  in  two  status  worlds,  that  of  work  place  in  the  big  city 
and  that  of  residence  in  the  suburb. 

At  the  work  place,  it  is  difficult,  even  in  large  enterprises,  to 
inflate  real  occupational  status,  although  great  status  tensions  are 
likely  to  be  lodged  there.  But  actual  job  position  is  not  so  well 
known  to  those  whom  one  meets  away  from  work.  It  may  be 
that  to  the  extent  that  status  aspirations  and  claims  are  frustrated 
at  work,  there  is  a  more  intense  striving  to  realize  them  off^  the 
job.  If  the  status  struggle  within  the  job  hierarchy  is  lost,  the 
status  struggle  outside  the  job  area  shifts  its  ground:  one  hides 
his  exact  job,  claims  prestige  from  his  title  or  firm,  or  makes  up 
job,  title,  or  firm.  Among  anonymous  metropolitan  throngs,  one 
can  make  claims  about  one's  job,  as  well  as  about  other  bases  of 
prestige,  which  minimize  or  override  actual  occupational  status. 

The  place  of  residence,  which  is  a  signal  of  income  and  style 
of  life,  limits  this  inflation  of  status;  for  neighbors,  like  job  associ- 
ates, will  not  readily  cash  in  higher  claims.  But  there  are  other 
areas.  Anonymous  and  the  just-known  strangers,  who  cannot  so 
readily  'place'  one,  may  cash  in  one's  claims.  Among  them,  the 
first,  often  the  only,  impression  one  makes  may  permit  a  brief 
success  in  status  claiming,  sometimes  as  a  sort  of  mutual  deal. 

n.  'Under  modem  conditions,'  Thorstein  Veblen  wrote,  'the 
struggle  for  existence  has,  in  a  very  appreciable  degree,  been 
transformed  into  a  struggle  to  keep  up  appearance.'  Personal 
worth  and  integrity  may  count  for  something  but  'one's  reputa- 
tion for  excellence  in  this  direction  does  not  penetrate  far  enough 
into  the  ver)'  wide  environment  to  which  a  person  is  exposed  in 


256  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

modem  society  to  satisfy  even  a  very  modest  craving  for  respect- 
ability. To  sustain  one's  dignity— and  to  sustain  one's  self -respect- 
under  the  eyes  of  people  who  are  not  socially  one's  immediate 
neighbors,  it  is  necessary  to  display  the  token  of  economic  worth, 
which  practically  coincides  .  .  .  with  economic  success.' 

The  leisure  of  many  middle-class  people  i§  entirely  taken  up 
by  attempts  to  gratify  their  status  claims.  Just  as  work  is»  made 
empty  by  the  processes  of  alienation,  so  leisure  is  made  hollow 
by  status  snobbery  and  the  demands  of  emulative  consumption. 
It  takes  money  to  do  something  nice  in  one's  off  time— when 
there  is  an  absence  of  inner  resources  and  a  status  avoidance  of 
cheaper  or  even  costless  forms  of  entertainment.  With  the  urban 
breakdown  of  compact  social  groups  in  smaller  communities,  the 
prestige  relations  become  impersonal;  in  the  metropolis,  when 
the  job  becomes  an  insecure  basis  or  even  a  negative  one,  then 
the  sphere  of  leisure  and  appearance  become  more  crucial  for 
status. 

'One  does  not  "make  much  of  a  showing"  in  the  eyes  of  the 
large  majority  of  the  people  whom  one  meets  with,'  Veblen  con- 
tinued, 'except  by  unremitting  demonstration  of  ability  to  pay. 
That  is  practically  the  only  means  which  the  average  of  us  have 
of  impressing  our  respectability  on  the  many  to  whom  we  are 
personally  unknown,  but  whose  transient  good  opinion  we  would 
so  gladly  enjoy.  So  it  comes  about  that  the  appearance  of  success 
is  very  much  to  be  desired,  and  is  even  in  many  cases  preferred 
to  the  substance  .  .  .  the  modern  industrial  organization  of  soci- 
ety has  practically  narrowed  the  scope  of  emulation  to  this  one 
line;  and  at  the  same  time  it  has  made  the  means  of  sustenance 
and  comfort  so  much  easier  to  obtain  as  very  materially  to  widen 
the  margin  of  human  exertion  that  can  be  devoted  to  purposes 
of  emulation.' 

Of  an  eighteenth-century  nobility,  Dickens  could  say  that  'dress 
was  the  one  unfailing  talisman  and  charm  used  for  keeping  all 
things  in  their  places,'  but  in  a  mass  society  without  a  stable 
system  of  status,  with  quick,  cheap  imitations,  dress  is  often  no 
talisman.  The  clerk  who  sees  beautifully  gowned  women  in  the 
movies  and  on  the  streets  may  wear  imitations  if  she  works  hard 
and,  skipping  the  spiced  ham  sandwich,  has  only  cokes  for  lunch. 
Her  imitations  are  easily  found  out,  but  that  is  not  to  say  they 


THE  STATUS  PANIC  257 

do  not  please  her.  Self-respectability  is  not  the  same  as  self-re- 
spect. On  the  personality  markets,  emotions  become  ceremonial 
gestures  by  which  status  is  claimed,  alienated  from  the  inner  feel- 
ings they  supposedly  express.  Self-estrangement  is  thus  inherent 
in  the  fetishism  of  appearance. 

in.  The  prestige  enjoyed  by  individual  white-collar  workers 
is  not  continuously  fixed  by  large  forces,  for  their  prestige  is  not 
continuously  the  same.  Many  are  involved  in  status  cycles,  which, 
as  Tom  Harrison  has  observed,  often  occur  in  a  sort  of  rhythmic 
pattern.  These  cycles  allow  people  in  a  lower  class  and  status 
level  to  act  like  persons  on  higher  levels  and  temporarily  to  get 
away  with  it. 

During  weekdays  the  white-collar  employee  receives  a  given 
volume  of  deference  from  a  given  set  of  people,  work  associates, 
friends,  family  members,  and  from  the  transient  glimpses  of 
strangers  on  transport  lines  and  street.  But  over  the  week  end, 
or  perhaps  a  week  end  once  a  month,  one  can  by  plan  raise 
oneself  to  higher  status:  clothing  changes,  the  restaurant  or  type 
of  food  eaten  changes,  the  best  theater  seats  are  had.  One 
cannot  well  change  one's  residence  over  the  week  end,  but  in 
the  big  city  one  can  get  away  from  it,  and  in  the  small  town  one 
can  travel  to  the  near-by  city.  Expressed  claims  of  status  may 
be  raised,  and  more  importantly  those  among  whom  one  claims 
status  may  vary— even  if  these  others  are  other  strangers  in  dif- 
ferent locales.  And  every  white-collar  girl  knows  the  value  of  a 
strict  segregation  of  regular  boy  friends,  who  might  drop  around 
the  apartment  any  night  of  the  week,  from  the  special  date  for 
whom  she  always  dresses  and  with  whom  she  always  goes  out. 

There  may  also  be  a  more  dramatic  yearly  status  cycle,  involv- 
ing the  vacation  as  its  high  point.  Urban  masses  look  forward  to 
vacations  not  'just  for  the  change,'  and  not  only  for  a  'rest  from 
work'— the  meaning  behind  such  phrases  is  often  a  lift  in  success- 
ful status  claims.  For  on  vacation,  one  can  buy  the  feeling,  even 
if  only  for  a  short  time,  of  higher  status.  The  expensive  resort, 
where  one  is  not  known,  the  swank  hotel,  even  if  for  three  days 
and  nights,  the  cruise  first  class— for  a  week.  Much  vacation  ap- 
paratus is  geared  to  these  status  cycles;  the  staffs  as  well  as  cli- 
entele play-act  the  whole  set-up  as  if  mutually  consenting  to  be 


258  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

part  of  the  successful  illusion.  For  such  experiences  once  a  year, 
sacrifices  are  often  made  in  long  stretches  of  gray  weekdays. 
The  bright  two  weeks  feed  the  dream  life  of  the  dull  pull. 

Psychologically,  status  cycles  provide,  for  brief  periods  of 
time,  a  holiday  image  of  self,  which  contrasts  sharply  with  the 
self-image  of  everyday  reality.  They  provide  a  temporary  satis- 
faction of  the  person's  prized  image  of  self,  thus  permitting  him 
to  cling  to  a  false  consciousness  of  his  status  position.  They  are 
among  the  forces  that  rationalize  and  make  life  more  bearable, 
compensate  for  economic  inferiority  by  allowing  temporary  satis- 
faction of  the  ambition  to  consume. 

Socially,  status  cycles  blur  the  realities  of  class  and  prestige 
differences  by  offering  respite  from  them.  Talk  of  the  'status  flu- 
idity of  American  life'  often  refers  merely  to  status  cycles,  even 
though  socially  these  cycles  of  higher  display  and  holiday  grati- 
fication do  not  modify  the  long-run  reality  of  more  fixed  positions. 

Status  cycles  further  the  tendency  of  economic  ambition  to 
be  fragmented,  made  trivial,  and  temporarily  satisfied  in  terms 
of  commodities  and  their  ostentatious  display.  The  whole  ebb 
and  flow  of  saving  and  spending,  of  working  and  consuming, 
may  be  geared  to  them.  Like  those  natives  who  starve  untfl 
whales  are  tossed  upon  the  beach,  and  then  gorge,  white-collar 
workers  may  suffer  long  privation  of  status  until  the  month-end 
or  year-end,  and  then  splurge  in  an  orgy  of  prestige  gratification 
and  consumption. 

Between  the  high  points  of  the  status  cycle  and  the  machinery 
of  amusement  there  is  a  coincidence:  the  holiday  image  of  self 
derives  from  both.  In  the  movie  the  white-collar  girl  vicariously 
plays  the  roles  she  thinks  she  would  like  to  play,  cashes  in  her 
claims  for  esteem.  At  the  peak  of  her  status  cycle  she  crudely 
play-acts  the  higher  levels,  as  she  believes  she  would  like  to 
always.  The  machinery  of  amusement  and  the  status  cycle  sus- 
tain the  illusionary  world  in  which  many  white-collar  people  now 
live. 


12 


Success 


Success'  in  America  has  been  a  widespread  fact,  an  engaging 
image,  a  driving  motive,  and  a  way  of  life.  In  the  middle  of  the 
twentieth  century,  it  has  become  less  widespread  as  fact,  more 
confused  as  image,  often  dubious  as  motive,  and  soured  as  a  way 
of  life. 

No  other  domestic  change  is  so  pivotal  for  the  tang  and  feel 
of  society  in  America,  or  more  ambiguous  for  the  inner  life  of  the 
individual,  and  none  has  been  so  intricately  involved  in  the 
transformation  of  the  old  into  the  new  middle  classes.  Other 
strata  have  certainly  been  affected,  but  the  middle  classes  have 
been  most  grievously  modified  by  the  newer  meanings  of  success 
and  the  increased  chances  of  failure. 

To  understand  the  meaning  of  this  shift  we  must  understand 
the  major  patterns  of  American  success  and  the  ideologies  char- 
acteristic of  each  of  them;  the  changing  role  of  the  educational 
system  as  an  occupational  elevator;  and  the  long-run  forces,  as 
well  as  the  effects  of  the  slump-war-boom  cycle,  which  lift  or 
lower  the  rate  of  upward  movement. 

1.   Patterns  and  Ideologies 

During  booms,  success  for  the  American  individual  has 
seemed  as  sure  as  social  progress,  and  just  as  surely  to  rest  on 
and  to  exemplify  personal  virtue.  The  American  gospel  of  suc- 
cess has  been  a  kind  of  individual  specification  of  the  middle- 
class  gospel  of  progress:  in  the  big,  self-made  men,  rising  after 

259 


260  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

the  Civil  War,  progress  seemed  to  pervade  the  whole  society. 
The  ambitious  springs  of  success  were  unambiguous,  its  money 
target  clear  and  visible,  and  its  paths,  if  rugged,  well  marked  out; 
there  was  a  surefootedness  about  the  way  middle-class  men  went 
about  their  lives. 

The  idea  of  the  successful  individual  was  linked  with  the  lib- 
eral ideology  of  expanding  capitalism.  Liberal  sociology,  assum- 
ing a  gradation  of  ranks  in  which  everyone  is  rewarded  accord- 
ing to  his  ability  and  efiFort,  has  paid  less  attention  to  the  fate 
of  groups  or  classes  than  to  the  solitary  individual,  naked  of  all 
save  personal  merit.  The  entrepreneur,  making  his  way  across 
the  open  market,  most  clearly  displayed  success  in  these  terms. 

The  way  up,  according  to  the  classic  style  of  liberalism,  was 
to  establish  a  small  enterprise  and  to  expand  it  by  competition 
with  other  enterprises.  The  worker  became  a  foreman  and  then 
an  industrialist;  the  clerk  became  a  bookkeeper  or  a  drummer 
and  then  a  merchant  on  his  own.  The  farmer's  son  took  up  land 
in  his  own  right  and,  long  before  his  old  age,  came  into  profits 
and  independence.  The  competition  and  effort  involved  in  these 
ways  up  formed  the  cradle  of  a  self-reliant  personality  and  the 
guarantee  of  economic  and  political  democracy  itself. 

Success  was  bound  up  with  the  expansible  possession  rather 
than  the  forward-looking  job.  It  was  with  reference  to  property 
that  young  men  were  spoken  of  as  having  great  or  small  'expec- 
tations.' Yet  in  this  image  success  rested  less  on  inheritances  than 
on  new  beginnings  from  the  bottom;  for,  it  was  thought,  'business 
long  ago  ceased  to  be  a  matter  of  inheritance,  and  became  the 
property  of  brains  and  persistence.' 

According  to  the  old  entrepreneur's  ideology,  success  is  always 
linked  with  the  sober  personal  virtues  of  will  power  and  thrift, 
habits  of  order,  neatness,  and  the  constitutional  inability  to  say 
Yes  to  the  easy  road.*  These  virtues  are  at  once  a  condition 
and  a  sign  of  success.  Without  them,  success  is  not  possible;  with 
them,  all  is  possible;  and,  as  is  clear  from  the  legends  of  their 

•  The  statement  of  success  ideologies  in  this  section  is  based  on 
thematic  analyses  of  some  twenty  books,  selected  at  random  from 
files  of  the  New  York  Public  Library,  ranging  from  1856— Freeman 
Hunt's  Worth  and  Wealth  (New  York,  Stringer  &  Howard) -to  1947- 
Loire  Brophy's  There's  Plenty  of  Room  at  the  Top  (New  York,  Simon 
&  Schuster). 


SUCCESS  261 

lives,  all  successful  men  have  practiced  these  virtues  with  great, 
driving  will,  for  'the  temple  of  Fortune  is  accessible  only  by  a 
steep,  rugged  and  difficult  path,  up  which  you  must  drag  your- 
self.' 

The  man  bent  on  success  will  be  upright,  exactly  punctual,  and 
high-minded;  he  will  soberly  refrain  from  liquor,  tobacco,  gam- 
bling, and  loose  women.  'Laughter,  when  it  is  too  hearty,  weak- 
ens the  power  of  mind;  avoid  it.'  He  will  never  be  in  a  hurry, 
will  always  carefully  finish  up  'each  separate  undertaking,'  and 
so  'keep  everything  under  control.'  He  will  know  'that  Method 
makes  Time,'  and  will  'promptly  improve  small  opportunities'  by 
diligent  attention  to  detail.  He  will  gain  an  ease  and  confidence 
of  endeavor,  for  self-reliance  in  all  things  will  insure  a  moral  pres- 
ence of  mind.  Also,  'a  man's  self-respect,  and  the  respect  of  his 
wife  and  children  for  him  and  themselves,  will  increase  continu- 
ally as  his  savings  augment.' 

To  honesty,  he  will  add  'a  great  degree  of  caution  and  pru- 
dence'; then  honesty,  besides  being  rewarded  in  the  hereafter, 
will  here  and  now,  be  'the  surest  way  to  worldly  thrift  and  pros- 
perity.' He  will  come  to  understand  that  'religion  and  business 
.  .  .  are  both  right  and  may  essentially  serve  each  other';  that 
'religion  is  a  mighty  ally  of  economy.  .  .  Vices  cost  more  than 
Virtues.  .  ,  Many  a  young  smoker  burns  up  in  advance  a  fifty- 
thousand-dollar  business';  and  more  broadly,  that  religion  forti- 
fies the  'integrity  which  is  a  man's  best  "reserve  stock." ' 

This  inspirational  ideology  does  not  often  concern  itself  with 
the  impersonal  structure  of  opportunity,  the  limits  the  economy 
sets  to  the  practice  of  personal  virtues;  and  when  it  does,  personal 
virtues  still  win  through:  'The  men  who  are  made  by  circum- 
stances are  unmade  by  trifling  misfortunes;  while  they  who  con- 
quer circumstances  snap  their  fingers  at  luck.'  Yet  in  relating  the 
detailed  means  of  success,  this  literature  also  reveals  a  good  deal 
about  its  social  conditions.  It  seems  to  have  been  directed  to  rural 
and  small-town  boys.  If  city  boys  have  better  education,  country 
boys  have  greater  'physical  and  moral  pre-eminence.'  In  provid- 
ing instruction  in  'polish,'  it  indicates  in  detail  how  the  rural 
'bumpkin'  must  conduct  himself  in  country  town  and  larger  city 
to  avoid  being  laughed  at  by  city  slickers.  The  aspiring  boy  is 
cautioned  never  to  be  'boisterous'  nor  have  'free  and  easy  man- 


262  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

ners.  .  .  The  manners  of  a  gentleman  are  a  sure  passport  to  suc- 
cess.' The  city,  in  this  literature,  is  imagined  as  a  goal,  but  more 
importantly,  there  is  a  Jeffersonian  warning  about  the  evils  of 
the  city  and  tlie  practical  admonition  that  'Businessmen  .  .  . 
are  not  accidental  outcroppings  from  the  great  army  of  smooth- 
haired  nice  young  clerks  who  would  rather  starve  in  the  city 
than  be  independent  in  the  country.' 

Occupationally,  the  legendary  road  runs  from  clerk  and  then 
bookkeeper  in  the  country  retail  store,  then  to  drummer  or  trav- 
eling salesman,  and  finally,  to  business  for  oneself,  usually  as  a 
merchant.  'He  who  seeks  for  the  merchant  of  the  future  will 
find  him  in  the  clerk  of  today,'  but  the  intermediate  step  is  very 
important  and  much  desired.  To  the  clerk,  the  drummer  is  a 
source  of  advice  about  promising  locations  and  opportunities  for 
new  stores;  the  drummer  can  inspect  opportunities  for  himself 
and  learn  about  a  wide  variety  of  commodity  'lines.'  He  also 
learns  to  judge  others  quickly  and  shrewdly  'so  that  in  making 
a  statement  he  could  follow  in  his  hearer's  mind  its  efiFects,  and 
be  prepared  to  stop  or  to  go  on  at  the  right  moment.'  In  fact: 
'AH  that  goes  towards  making  a  man  a  good  merchant  is  needed 
on  the  road  by  a  traveling  salesman.' 

The  legendary  fork  in  the  road  is  often  'a  business  career' 
versus  farm  life  or  life  in  a  factory.  But  whatever  its  occupational 
content,  it  is  identified  with  a  moral  choice:  'Keeping  on  the 
right  side'  versus  'being  lost.'  He  who  fails,  who  remains  a  clerk, 
is  'lost,'  'destroyed,'  'ruined.'  That  end  can  be  met  by  going  either 
too  slow  or  too  fast,  and  the  'easy  success'  of  a  few  prominent 
men  should  not  'dazzle  other  men  to  destruction.' 

The  entrepreneurial  pattern  of  success  and  its  inspirational 
ideology  rested  upon  an  economy  of  many  small  proprietorships. 
Under  a  centralized  enterprise  system,  the  pattern  of  success  be- 
comes a  pattern  of  the  climb  within  and  between  prearranged 
hierarchies.  Whatever  the  level  of  opportunity  may  be,  the  way 
up  does  not  now  typically  include  the  acquisition  of  independent 
property.  Only  those  who  already  have  property  can  now  achieve 
success  based  upon  it. 

The  shift  from  a  liberal  capitalism  of  small  properties  to  a  cor- 
porate system  of  monopoly  capitalism  is  the  basis  for  the  shift 


SUCCESS  263 

in  the  path  and  in  the  content  of  success.  In  the  older  pattern, 
the  white-collar  job  was  merely  one  step  on  the  grand  road 
to  independent  entrepreneurship;  in  the  new  pattern,  the  white- 
collar  way  involves  promotions  within  a  bureaucratic  hierarchy. 
When  only  one-fifth  of  the  population  are  free  enterprisers  (and 
not  that  many  securely  so),  independent  entiepreneurship  can- 
not very  well  be  the  major  end  of  individual  economic  life.  The 
inspirational  literature  of  entrepreneurial  success  has  been  an 
assurance  for  the  individual  and  an  apology  for  the  system.  Now 
it  is  more  apologetic,  less  assuring. 

For  some  three-fourths  of  the  urban  middle  class,  the  salaried 
employees,  the  occupational  climb  replaces  heroic  tactics  in  the 
open  competitive  market.  Although  salaried  employees  may  com- 
pete with  one  another,  their  field  of  competition  is  so  hedged  in 
by  bureaucratic  regulation  that  their  competition  is  likely  to  be 
seen  as  grubbing  and  backbiting.  The  main  chance  now  becomes 
a  series  of  small  calculations,  stretched  over  the  working  lifetime 
of  the  individual:  a  bureaucracy  is  no  testing  field  for  heroes. 

The  success  literature  has  shifted  with  the  success  pattern.  It 
is  still  focused  upon  personal  virtues,  but  they  are  not  the  sober 
virtues  once  imputed  to  successful  entrepreneurs.  Now  the  stress 
is  on  agility  rather  than  ability,  on  'getting  along'  in  a  context  of 
associates,  superiors,  and  rules,  rather  than  'getting  ahead'  across 
an  open  market;  on  who  you  know  rather  than  what  you  know; 
on  techniques  of  self-display  and  the  generalized  knack  of  han- 
dling people,  rather  than  on  moral  integrity,  substantive  accom- 
plishments, and  solidity  of  person;  on  loyalty  to,  or  even  identity 
with,  one's  own  firm,  rather  than  entrepreneurial  virtuosity.  The 
best  bet  is  the  style  of  the  efiicient  executive,  rather  than  the 
drive  of  the  entrepreneur. 

'Circumstances,  personality,  temperament,  accident,'  as  well  as 
hard  work  and  patience,  now  appear  as  key  factors  governing 
success  or  failure.  One  should  strive  for  'experience  and  responsi- 
bility within  one's  chosen  field,'  with  'little  or  no  thought  of 
money.'  Special  skills  and  'executive  ability,'  preferably  native, 
are  the  ways  up  from  routine  work.  But  the  most  important  single 
factor  is  'personality,'  which  '.  .  .  commands  attention  ...  by 
charm  .  .  .  force    of    character,    or  .  .  .  demeanor.  .  .  Accom- 


264  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

plishment  without  .  .  .  personality  is  unfortunate.  .  .  Personal- 
ity ..  .  without  industry  is  .  .  .  undesirable.' 

To  be  courteous  'will  help  you  to  get  ahead  .  .  .  you  will 
have  much  more  fun  .  .  .  will  be  much  less  fatigued  at  night 
.  .  .  will  be  more  popular,  have  more  friends.'  So,  'Train  your- 
self to  smile.  .  .  Express  physical  and  mental  alertness.  .  .  Radi- 
ate self-confidence.  .  .  Smile  often  and  sincerely.'  'Everything 
you  say,  everything  you  do,  creates  impressions  upon  other  peo- 
ple .  .  .  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave,  you've  got  to  get  along 
with  other  people.  Use  sound  sales  principles  and  you'll  do  better 
in  "selling"  your  merchandise,  your  ideas,  and  yourself.' 

The  prime  meaning  of  opportunity  in  a  society  of  employees  is 
to  serve  the  big  firm  beyond  fhe  line  of  a  job's  duty  and  hence  to 
bring  oneself  to  the  attention  of  the  higher-ups  who  control  up- 
ward movement.  This  entails  dependability  and  enthusiasm  in 
handling  the  little  job  in  a  big  way.  'Character  .  .  .  includes 
.  .  .  innate  loyalty  in  little  things  and  enthusiastic  interest  in  the 
job  at  hand.  .  .  In  a  word,  thoroughly  dependable  and  generally 
with  an  optimistic,  helpful  attitude.' 

'Getting  ahead'  becomes  'a  continual  selling  job.  .  .  Whether 
you  are  seeking  a  new  position  or  are  aiming  at  the  job  just 
ahead.  In  either  case  you  must  sell  yourself  and  keep  on  sell- 
ing. .  .  You  have  a  product  and  that  product  is  yourself.'  The 
skillful  personal  maneuver  and  the  pohtic  approach  in  inter-or- 
ganizational contacts,  the  planful  impressing  of  the  business  su- 
perior become  a  kind  of  Machiavellism  for  the  little  man,  a  turn- 
ing of  oneself  into  an  instrument  by  which  to  use  others  for  the 
end  of  success.  'Become  genuinely  interested  in  other  people.  .  . 
Smile.  .  .  Be  a  good  listener.  .  .  Talk  in  terms  of  the  other  man's 
interest.  .  .  Make  the  other  person  feel  important— and  do  it  sin- 
cerely. .  .  I  am  talking,'  says  Dale  Carnegie,  'about  a  new  way 
of  life.' 

The  heraldry  of  American  success  has  been  the  greenback; 
even  when  inspirational  writers  are  most  inspirational,  the  big 
money  is  always  there.  Both  entrepreneurial  and  white-collar 
patterns  involve  the  remaking  of  personality  for  pecuniary  ends, 
but  in  the  entrepreneurial  pattern  money-success  involved  the 
acquisition  of  virtues  good  in  themselves:  the  money  is  always 


SUCCESS  265 

to  be  used  for  good  works,  for  virtue  and  good  works  justify 
riches.  In  the  white-collar  pattern,  there  is  no  such  moral  sancti- 
fying of  the  means  of  success;  one  is  merely  prodded  to  become 
an  instrument  of  success,  to  acquire  tactics  not  virtues;  money 
success  is  assumed  to  be  an  obviously  good  thing  for  which  no 
sacrifice  is  too  great. 

The  entrepreneurial  and  white-collar  ways  of  success,  although 
emerging  in  historical  sequence,  are  not  clear-cut  phases  through 
which  American  aspiration  and  endeavor  have  passed.  They  now 
co-exist,  and  each  has  varying  relevance  in  different  economic 
areas  and  phases  of  the  economic  cycle.  Each  has  also  come  up 
against  its  own  kinds  of  difficulty,  which  limit  its  use  as  a  prod 
to  striving.  In  a  society  of  employees  in  large-scale  enterprises, 
only  a  limited  number  can  attempt  to  follow  the  entrepreneurial 
pattern;  in  a  society  that  has  turned  itself  into  a  great  salesroom, 
the  salesman's  ways  of  success  are  likely  to  be  severely  competi- 
tive, and,  at  the  same  time,  rationalized  out  of  existence;  in  a 
society  in  which  the  educational  level  of  the  lower  ranks  is  con- 
stantly rising  and  jobs  are  continually  rationalized,  the  white- 
collar  route  to  the  top  is  likely  to  come  up  against  competition  it 
never  knew  in  more  educationally  restricted  situations. 

2.  The  Educational  Elevator 

The  American  belief  in  the  value  of  universal  education  has 
been  a  salient  feature  of  democratic  ideology;  in  fact,  since  the 
Jacksonian  era,  education  for  all  has  often  been  virtually  identi- 
fied with  the  operation  of  a  truly  democratic  society.  Moreover, 
the  hope  for  more  education  has  slowly  been  realized.  Eighty 
years  ago  a  little  over  half,  but  today  over  four-fifths  of  the  chil- 
dren of  appropriate  age  are  enrolled  in  public  elementary  and 
secondary  schools. 

This  massive  rise  in  enrollment  has  strengthened  the  feeling  of 
status  equality,  especially  in  those  smaller  cities  where  all  the 
children,  regardless  of  social  or  occupational  rank,  are  likely  to 
attend  the  same  high  school.  It  has  aided  immensely  in  Ameri- 
canizing the  immigrant.  And  it  has  spread  and  generally  strength- 
ened old  middle-class  ideologies,  for  teachers  represent  and  re- 
inforce middle-class   attitudes   and   values,   manners   and   skills. 


266  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

Yet,  in  spite  of  this  reinforcing  of  old  middle-class  mores,  mass 
education  has  also  been  one  of  the  major  social  mechanisms  of 
the  rise  of  the  new  middle-class  occupations,  for  these  occupa- 
tions require  those  skills  that  have  been  provided  by  the  educa- 
tional system. 

In  performing  these  functions,  especially  the  last,  American 
education  has  shifted  toward  a  more  explicit  vocational  emphasis, 
functioning  as  a  link  in  occupational  mobility  between  genera- 
tions. High  schools,  as  well  as  colleges  and  universities,  have  been 
reshaped  for  the  personnel  ileeds  of  business  and  government. 
In  their  desire  for  serviceable  practicality,  the  schools  have 
adapted  themselves  to  changing  demands,  and  the  public  has 
seemed  glad  to  have  its  children  trained  for  the  available  jobs. 

The  most  fundamental  question  to  ask  of  any  educational  sys- 
tem is  what  kind  of  a  product  do  its  administrators  expect  to 
turn  out?  And  for  what  kind  of  society?  In  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, the  answer  was  'the  good  citizen'  in  a  'democratic  republic' 
In  the  middle  of  the  twentieth  century,  it  is  'the  successful  man' 
in  a  'society  of  specialists  with  secure  jobs.' 

In  the  world  of  small  entrepreneurs,  little  or  no  educational 
preparation  was  needed  for  success,  much  less  to  get  along:  one 
was  stubborn,  or  courageous,  had  common  sense  and  worked 
hard.  Education  may  have  been  viewed  as  a  main  road  to  social 
equality  and  political  freedom,  and  as  a  help  in  meeting  oppor- 
tunity so  that  ability  and  talent  might  be  appropriately  rewarded. 
But  education  was  not  the  big  avenue  of  economic  advancement 
for  the  masses  of  the  populace. 

In  the  new  society,  the  meaning  of  education  has  shifted  from 
status  and  political  spheres  to  economic  and  occupational  areas. 
In  the  white-collar  life  and  its  patterns  of  success,  the  educational 
segment  of  the  individual's  career  becomes  a  key  to  his  entire 
occupational  fate. 

Formal  requirements  for  entry  into  different  jobs  and  expec- 
tations of  ascent  tend  to  become  fixed  by  educational  levels.  On 
the  higher  levels,  college  is  the  cradle  of  the  professions  and 
semi-professions,  as  well  as  a  necessary  status-mark  for  higher 
positions.  As  the  virtues  and  talents  of  the  entrepreneur  are  re- 
placed by  the  skills  and  prestige  of  the  educated  expert,  formal 


SUCCESS  267 

education  becomes  central  to  social  and  economic  success.  Sons 
who  are  better  educated  than  their  fathers  are  more  likely  to 
occupy  higher  occupational  positions:  in  one  sample  of  urban 
males,  studied  by  Richard  Centers,  some  46  per  cent  of  the  sons 
who  were  better  educated  than  their  fathers  reached  higher 
positions,  whereas  only  16  per  cent  of  those  whose  education 
was  poorer  did.  The  educational  link  was  specifically  important 
in  the  U.S.  Army  during  World  War  II:  64  per  cent  of  the  officers, 
but  only  11  per  cent  of  the  enlisted  men,  had  been  to  college. 
The  aim  of  college  men  today,  especially  in  elite  colleges,  is 
a  forward-looking  job  in  a  large  corporation.  Such  a  job  in- 
volves training  not  only  in  vocational  skills,  but  also  in  social 
mannerisms.  Harold  Taylor,  president  of  Sarah  Lawrence,  writes: 
'The  ideal  graduate  in  the  present  employment  market  of  indus- 
trial executives  is  a  fraternity  man  with  a  declared  disinterest  in 
political  or  social  affairs,  gentile,  white,  a  member  of  the  football 
team,  a  student  with  a  record  of  A  in  each  course,  a  man  popular 
with  everyone  and  well  known  on  the  campus,  with  many  mem- 
berships in  social  clubs— a  man  who  can  be  imagined  in  twenty 
years  as  a  subject  for  a  Calvert  advertisement.  The  large  success- 
ful universities  have  confirmed  this  stereotype  by  the  plans  they 
make  for  the  campus  social  life  of  the  students  and  by  the  value 
system  implicit  in  its  organization.  .  .  Even  the  liberal  arts  col- 
leges seem  bent  upon  becoming  training  schools  for  conservative 
industrial  executives.' 

Although  the  middle-class  monopoly  on  high-school  education 
has  been  broken,  equality  of  educational  opportunity  has  not 
been  reached;  many  young  people  are  unable  to  complete  their 
secondary  school  education  because  of  economic  restrictions. 
'  'Generally  speaking,'  Walter  Kotschnig  concludes,  'the  children 
of  large  families  in  the  lowest  income  brackets  have  little  chance 
of  graduating  from  high  school.  They  have  to  leave  school  early 
to  help  their  families.  Most  of  them  will  never  be  anything  but 
poorly  paid  unskilled  workers  for  the  simple  reason  that  .  .  . 
education  has  become  the  main  avenue  to  economic  and  social 
success.  The  situation  on  the  college  level  is  even  worse.  .  .'  The 
most  careful   study   available  reveals  that   in   many   cases   the 


268  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

father's  income  rather  than  the  boy's  brains  determines  who  shall 
be  college  trained. 

The  parent's  class  position  is  also  reflected  in  the  type  of  cur- 
riculum taken.  Students  of  law,  medicine,  or  liberal  arts  gener- 
ally come  from  families  having  twice  the  yearly  income  of  stu- 
dents in  nursing,  teaching,  or  commercial  work.  'Of  the  580  boys 
and  girls  in  a  thousand  who  reach  the  third  year  of  high  school,' 
Lloyd  Warner  and  his  associates  write,  'about  half  are  taking  a 
course  which  leads  to  college.  One  hundred  and  fifty  enter  col- 
lege, and  70  graduate.  These  are  average  figures  for  the  country 
as  a  whole  ...  an  average  of  some  two  hundred  out  of  every 
thousand  young  people  fail  to  achieve  the  goal  toward  which 
they  started  in  high  school.' 

The  major  occupational  shift  in  college  education  has  been 
from  old  middle-class  parents  to  new  middle-class  children;  the 
major  shift  via  high-school  education  has  been  from  skilled- 
worker  parents  to  new  middle-class  children.  Colleges  and  uni- 
versities have  been  social  elevators  carrying  the  children  of  small 
businessmen  and  farmers  to  the  lower  order  of  the  professions. 
At  the  University  of  Chicago,  for  example,  between  1893  and 
1931,  about  4  out  of  10  of  the  fathers  of  graduates  (bachelor 
degrees)  were  in  business,  commercial,  or  proprietary  occupa- 
tions. Only  about  one-fourth  of  these  fathers  were  in  professional 
service,  but  62  per  cent  of  the  sons  and  73  per  cent  of  the 
daughters  entered  such  service. 

Mobility  between  generations  probably  increases  from  old  to 
new  middle  classes  during  depressions,  as,  especially  in  the 
upper-middle  brackets,  parents  seek  to  secure  their  children  from 
the  effects  of  the  market.  Rather  than  carry  on  his  father's  busi- 
ness, many  a  boy  has  been  trained,  at  his  parents'  sacrifice,  to 
help  man  some  unit  of  the  big-business  system  that  has  destroyed 
his  father's  business. 

As  the  old  middle  classes  have  come  to  be  distressed  and  inse- 
cure about  their  small-propertied  existence,  they  have  become  un- 
easy about  their  ability  to  get  their  children  into  positions  equal 
to  or  better  than  their  own.  At  the  same  time,  wage-workers  have 
aspired  to  have  their  children  attain  higher  levels.  Both  classes 
have  emphatically  demanded  'educational  opportunity'  and  both 
have  sacrificed  in  order  to  give  children  better  ( more )  education. 


SUCCESS  269 

Thirty-five  years  ago  John  Corbin  cried  in  the  name  of  the 
educated  white-collar  people  that  education  was  as  much  a  con- 
tribution to  the  nation's  wealth  as  property,  that  education  was 
the  white-collar  employee's  'capital,'  the  major  basis  of  his 
claim  to  prestige,  and  the  means  by  which  he  should  close  up  his 
ranks.  Yet,  as  a  type  of  'capital,'  education  carries  a  limitation 
that  farms  and  businesses  do  not:  its  exercise  is  dependent  upon 
those  who  control  and  manage  jobs.  Today,  according  to  a  For- 
tune survey,  the  idea  of  going  into  business  for  oneself  'is  so 
seldom  expressed  among  college  graduates  as  to  seem  an  anach- 
ronism.' 

On  the  one  hand,  there  is  a  demand  for  'equal  educational 
opportunities'  for  aU,  which  once  unambiguously  meant  better 
and  more  secure  positions  for  all.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are 
now  strong  tendencies,  which  in  all  probability  will  continue, 
for  the  educational  requirements  of  many  white-collar  positions 
to  decline,  and,  moreover,  for  the  competition  for  even  these  posi- 
tions to  increase.  As  a  result,  the  belief  in  universal  education 
as  a  sacrosanct  fetish  has  come  to  be  questioned.  This  question- 
ing, which  began  about  the  time  of  World  War  I,  became  more 
widespread  during  the  'thirties  and  came  to  sharp  focus  after 
World  War  II,  represents,  in  Perry  Miller's  phrase,  the  'disloca- 
tion in  a  basic  tradition.' 

Democratic  ideologists  now  point  out  that  almost  80  per  cent 
of  fifth-grade  students,  who  are  mentally  capable  of  college  edu- 
cation, never  reach  college,  so  millions  of  citizens,  according  to 
E.  J.  McGrath,  U.S.  Commissioner  of  Education,  'go  through  life 
functioning  below  the  level  of  their  potential.'  This  is  undoubt- 
edly true,  but  statisticians,  occupational  forecasters,  and  an  in- 
creasing number  of  educational  officials  raise  the  question 
whether  or  not  the  occupational  structure  can  possibly  provide 
the  jobs  that  are  expected  by  college  graduates. 

During  the  last  half  century,  college  graduates,  increasing  four 
times  as  much  as  the  general  population,  were  involved  in  the 
expansion  of  higher  white-collar  occupations.  So  education  paid 
off:  ten  years  ago,  college  graduates  earned  one-third  more  than 
the  U.S.  average.  Today,  however,  college  graduates  earn  only 
one-tenth  more  than  the  U.S.  average,  and,  according  to  an  in- 
formed prediction  by  Seymour  E.  Harris,  in  twenty  years  'it 


270  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

won't  pay  to  be  educated.'  By  then,  instead  of  3  million  living 
college  graduates  as  in  1930,  there  will  be  between  10  and  14 
million.  In  order  to  meet  their  expectations,  the  professions  would 
have  to  absorb  between  8  and  11  million  of  them,  yet  between 
1910  and  1940  professions  expanded  less  than  2  million.  There 
are  warning  cries  among  educational  ideologists,  recalling  the 
contributions  made  by  'disappointed  intellectuals  to  the  rise  of 
fascism  in  Europe,'  and  there  are  maneuvers  and  proclamations 
among  school  officials  which  reflect  shifts  in  the  role  of  education 
in  the  American  success  story. 

Chancellor  William  J.  Wallin  of  the  New  York  State  Board  of 
Regents  has  decried  higher  education  for  all,  declaring  'that  the 
country  might  produce  "surplus  graduates"  who,  embittered  with 
their  frustration,  would  "turn  upon  society  and  the  government, 
more  effective  and  better  armed  in  their  destructive  wrath  by  the 
education  we  have  given  them." '  'Equality  of  opportunity,'  Har- 
vard President  Conant  has  recently  said,  'is  one  of  the  cardinal 
principles  of  this  country.  .  .  Yet  at  the  same  time,  no  young 
man  or  woman  should  be  encouraged  or  enticed  into  taking  the 
kinds  of  advanced  educational  training  which  are  going  to  lead 
to  a  frustrated  economic  life.'  'For  a  large  majority  of  young 
Americans,  a  four-year  college  education  was  not  only  "needlessly 
expensive,"  but  "socially  undesirable." ' 

One  of  the  most  popular  solutions  now  being  proposed  is  the 
establishment  of  several  educational  ladders,  each  reaching  to 
different  levels  of  the  occupational  hierarchy.  Such  ideas  are  now 
rather  widely,  although  informally,  being  put  into  practice  in 
U.S.  high  schools.  The  principal  of  one  high  school  says:  'This 
educational  system  is  a  terrific  waste  of  money  and  time  to  the 
city,  since  so  few  people  can  by  any  chance  become  members  of 
the  white-coUar  class  and  so  many  must  follow  some  vocational 
line.  .  .  It  is  surprising  how  many  people  in  8C  want  the  prestige 
of  a  white-collar  job.  So  I  point  out  how  poor  the  pay  is  and 
endeavor  to  point  out  how  hard  it  is  to  fit  oneself  for  such  a  job 
and  to  make  a  success  of  it;  the  majority  of  them  are  unfitted 
for  any  such  work.  .  .  I  am  giving  all  the  groups  A,  B,  and  C  a 
talking  to,  explaining  the  disadvantages  of  the  white-collar  job 
to  all  of  them.'  'There  is  clear  evidence,'  comments  sociologist 
Lloyd  Warner,  who  gathered  these  quotations,  'that  our  educa- 


SUCCESS  271 

tional  system  is  now  permitting  too  many  to  use  high  school 
and  college  for  the  purpose  of  attaining  unavailable  professional 
and  managerial  positions,  with  resultant  failure  and  frustration 
and  loss  of  social  solidarity.' 

Education  will  work  as  a  means  of  success  only  so  long  as  the 
occupational  needs  of  a  society  continue  to  demand  education. 
The  recognition  that  they  might  not  has  led  to  the  idea,  in 
Kotchnig's  words,  of  giving  'the  masses  of  young  people  a  gen- 
eral and  special  education  in  keeping  with  their  abilities,  while 
preparing  leaders  for  the  "several  elites,"  thus  breaking  down 
the  one-sided  emphasis  on  the  intellectual  careers.'  Confronted 
with  such  ideas,  'Progressive'  educational  theorists  add  to  them 
the  assumption  that  tests,  measurements,  placement  services,  and 
vocational  guidance  can  at  early  ages  select  those  who  should  go 
on,  via  education,  to  higher  positions  and  those  who  should 
terminate  their  education,  and  hence  their  occupational  chances, 
at  lower  levels. 

We  have  thus  come  a  long  way  from  the  simple  faith  in  'equal 
educational  opportunity'  as  part  of  the  American  pattern  of 
success.  First,  with  education  a  highly  specialized  channel  for 
elites  with  high  class  chances,  the  major  avenues  of  advance- 
ment do  not  involve  education:  independent  men,  who  are  'mak- 
ing themselves,'  compete  on  the  open  market  and  find  tiieir  own 
levels. 

Second,  with  the  democratization  of  education  as  political  de- 
mand and  economic  need,  the  occupational  structures  require 
literacy  and  some  skills,  and  bring  about  a  period  of  success  via 
education.  The  single  ladder  is  not  questioned,  the  ideology  of 
equal  opportunity  means  that  all  top  positions  are  competed  for 
by  all  those  with  the  ability  to  climb  the  educational  ladder. 
Third,  almost  all  occupational  mobility  requires  education,  but 
as  supply  exceeds  demand,  education  is  stratified  bureaucrati- 
cally,  by  sorting  out  the  young  through  tests  and  measurements. 
There  are  increased  tendencies  to  manage  the  education-occupa- 
tion structure  and  steer  it;  and  magical  notions  of  the  environ- 
ment are  given  up.  As  demand  for  educated  people  falls  behind 
supply,  as  educated  occupations  are  divided  and  rationalized,  as 
eniollments  continue  to  rise,  the  income  and  prestige  differ- 
ences between  the  more-educated  and  the  less-educated  masses 


272  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

decrease.  Among  those  who  are  not  allowed  to  use  the  educated 
skills  they  have  acquired,  boredom  increases,  hope  for  success 
collapses  into  disappointment,  and  the  sacrifices  that  don't  pay  ofi 
lead  to  disillusionment. 


3.  Origins  and  Mobilities 

In  both  entrepreneurial  and  white-collar  patterns  of  success, 
movement  upward  has  been  subject  to  rather  severe  counter- 
tendencies  during  the  course  of  the  twentieth  century.  No  one 
knows  precisely  whether  the  rate  of  upward  mobility— the  pro- 
portion of  people  who  rise  from  one  occupational  level  to  another 
—has  remained  constant,  declined,  or  gone  up.  That  rate,  how- 
ever, depends  upon  a  set  of  factors  that  at  any  given  time  deter- 
mine the  chances  of  those  on  each  level  to  rise,  fall,  or  hold  their 
own. 

In  the  past,  certain  well-known  trends  supported  upward  mo- 
bility in  the  entrepreneurial  pattern.  The  most  obvious  of  these 
were:  the  total  economic  expansion  of  a  society  of  decentralized 
property;  the  physical  spread  of  markets  and  the  rise  in  volumes 
of  production;  the  industrialization,  which  rested  upon  a  private 
exploitation  of  unexampled  natural  resources  in  a  steadily  rising 
market.  In  short:  the  American  nineteenth  century,  when  the 
entrepreneurial  pattern  of  success  seemed  almost  automatic. 

By  the  'nineties,  however,  and  increasingly  during  the  twenti- 
eth century,  the  centralization  of  property  worked  to  decrease 
the  chances  of  those  lower  on  the  scale  to  rise  to  entrepreneur- 
ship,  to  retain  and  to  expand  their  holdings.  Resources  were  less 
accessible  to  men  of  small  means,  access  to  the  higher  capital  re- 
quirements of  enterprise  more  diflBcult;  many  markets  were 
monopolized,  and  as  a  national  whole  the  market  began  to  have 
a  lower  rate  of  increase,  as  birth  rates  and  immigration  dropped. 

Yet,  even  as  the  entrepreneurial  was  declining  as  a  mass  way 
of  success,  the  white-collar  pattern  was  opening  up.  What  hap- 
pened between  the  'nineties  and  the  middle  'thirties  is  easy  to 
understand  from  a  few  general  figures. 

The  chance  to  rise  is,  of  course,  affected  by  the  ratio  of  upper 
positions  to  lower  aspirants.  The  wage-worker  strata  level  off  and 
the  white-collar  strata  expand,  so  the  chance  to  rise  from  wage- 


SUCCESS  273 

worker  to  white-collar  standing  increases.  Between  1870  and 
1930,  Eldridge  Sibley  has  calculated,  an  average  of  about  150,- 
000  workers  and  farmers  per  year  'ascended'  into  white-collar 
ranks.  But  the  entrepreneurial  stratum  declined  sharply  as  a  pro- 
portion of  the  total  at  work.  Therefore,  we  may  suppose  white- 
collar  employees  to  have  been  recruited  from  both  old  middle 
class  and  wage-workers.  Of  course  we  can  never  know  the  in- 
tricate individual  patterns  of  job-shifting  within  and  between  the 
last  two  or  three  American  generations  that  have  resulted  in  the 
present  division  of  occupations.  We  have  only  fragmentary  snap- 
shots, most  of  them  recent,  of  the  occupational  distances  sons 
and  daughters  have  moved  from  the  stations  of  their  fathers. 

Most  of  the  white-collar  workers  of  the  present  generation— the 
oflBce  workers  and  salespeople— seem  to  be  rather  evenly  split  in 
origin  between  old  middle  classes  and  wage-worker  strata;  about 
4  out  of  10  have  fathers  who  were  free  enterprisers,  and  another 
4,  urban  wage-workers.  Over  the  past  three  generations,  lower 
white-collar  workers  have  probably  shifted  in  origin  to  include 
greater  proportions  of  wage- worker  children.*  The  new  middle 
class  itself  has  expanded  so  recently  that  only  a  small  proportion 
of  the  present  white-collar  generation  could  be  expected  to  be 
of  white-collar  origin. 

The  higher  white-collar  people,  salaried  professionals  and 
managerial  employees,  are  less  likely  to  derive  from  wage-work- 
ers and  more  likely  to  come  from  higher  levels,  or  from  their 
own  ranks,  t 

As  white-collar  strata  have  expanded,  they  have  fallen  into 
line  with  the  over-all  historical  pattern  of  occupational  structure: 
the  upper  strata  became  more  rigid  in  the  presence  of  upward 

**  In  a  small  California  town,  studied  in  the  middle  'thirties  by  Percy 
Davidson  and  Dewey  Anderson,  46  per  cent  of  the  clerks  had  fathers 
who  were  proprietors,  41  per  cent  wage-workers.  But  55  per  cent  ol 
the  fathers  who  were  themselves  clerks  were  the  sons  of  proprietors 
and  only  29  per  cent,  wage-workers.  Of  course,  such  figures  probably 
reflect  over-all  occupational  changes  as  well  as  shifts  in  the  origins  of 
white-collar  workers. 

f  In  one  middle-sized  middle-western  city  in  1945,  for  example,  we 
found  that  43  per  cent  of  such  people,  but  only  36  per  cent  of  lower 
white  collar— salespeople  and  office  workers— had  fathers  who  were 
free  enterprisers.  Origins  from  wage-worker  strata  of  these  two  groups 
were  37  and  46  per  cent  respectively. 


274  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

mobility  among  the  middle  and  lower.  In  fact,  the  rise  of  white- 
collar  occupations  has  allowed  for  the  historical  continuance  of 
American  mobility.  For  while  the  rise  of  men  from  wage-worker 
origins  into  top  business  positions  was  definitely  curtailed  by  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century,  the  formation  of  new  white- 
collar  hierarchies  allowed  for  the  upward  mobility  of  the  wage- 
workers  to  continue. 

Even  as  the  new  replaces  the  old  middle  class,  the  top  levels 
of  each  are  being  replaced  from  among  its  own  strata:  over  one- 
third  of  the  business,  managerial,  and  professional  people  today 
derive  from  the  same  occupational  categories.  This  rigidity  may 
be  stronger  than  appears  from  tables  of  the  origin  of  the  present 
labor  force,  for  the  statistical  snapshot  only  catches  the  daughter 
of  a  big  businessman  as  an  ofiBce  worker;  it  does  not  show  her  as 
a  young  girl  in  a  middle  or  small-sized  city,  working  as  the  sec- 
retary or  receptionist  to  a  friend  of  her  father,  leaving  in  a  year 
to  marry  the  rising  manager  of  one  of  the  town's  largest  corpora- 
tions, quite  different  from  the  carpenter's  daughter  clerking  in 
the  bargain  basement  of  the  town's  department  store,  glancing 
up  at  the  floorwalker  who  passes  twice  each  day,  Yet  upward 
mobility  is  still  prevalent  today  among  the  sons  of  wage-workers 
who  move  into  white-collar  or  business  positions.  Probably  about 
one-third  of  today's  small  businessmen  are  sons  of  wage  earners. 

Upward  mobility  between  generations  has  often  been  ac- 
counted for  by  the  low  fertility  rate  of  higher  social  classes.  This 
difference  in  fertility  is  due  largely  to  the  later  age  of  marriage, 
and  the  greater  use  and  effectiveness  of  birth-control  measures 
among  higher-income  groups.  Now,  with  rising  standards  of  liv- 
ing and  broader  access  to  methods  of  birth  control,  it  is  an  open 
question  how  long  upward  mobility  based  on  differing  fertility 
rates  can  continue.  Also,  with  the  importance  of  the  educational 
link  in  the  pattern  of  success,  the  father's  position  is  crucial  to  the 
child's.  And  when,  as  we  have  seen,  the  educational  link  becomes 
insecure,  a  consciousness  of  something  wrong  in  middle-class 
life  becomes  more  widespread. 

Within  the  individual's  lifetime,  the  chance  to  rise  has  been 
affected  by  the  shape-up  of  white-collar  jobs.  Their  concentra- 
tion into  larger  units  and  their  specialization  have  made  for  many 


SUCCESS  275 

blind  alleys,  lessened  the  opportunity  to  learn  about  'other  de- 
partments,' or  the  business  as  a  whole.  The  rationalization  of 
white-collar  work  means  that  as  the  number  of  replaceable  posi- 
tions expands  more  than  the  number  of  higher  positions,  the 
chances  of  climbing  decrease.  Also,  as  higher  positions  become 
more  technical,  they  are  often  more  likely  to  be  filled  by  people 
from  outside  the  hierarchy.  So  the  ideology  of  promotion— the 
expectation  of  a  step-by-step  ascent,  no  longer  seems  a  sure 
thing.  As  many  as  80  per  cent  of  one  large  sample  of  clerical 
workers,  reported  the  War  Manpower  Commission,  e.xpected  no 
promotion. 

Yet  there  is  one  fact— heavy  turnover  at  the  bottom— which 
still  allows  ascent  within  many  large  white-collar  hierarchies. 
The  personnel  manager  of  one  insurance  company,  employing 
some  14,000  clerks,  says:  'To  tell  you  the  truth  our  turnover  is 
just  about  as  I  like  it.  Turnover  of  course  is  relative  to  the  times 
and  to  what  goes  on  in  other  companies.  But  our  file  clerks, 
which  is  the  lowest  level  of  clerical  work,  well,  you  couldn't  find 
one  here  who  had  worked  more  than  a  year  at  that  job.  We  get 
them  right  from  high  school.  The  young  girl  is  what  we  want, 
and  in  a  year  they  are  either  promoted  or  they  have  gone  away. 
On  the  other  hand,  you  can't  find  any  secretaries  who  have 
been  here  only  two  or  three  years;  all  those  better  jobs  are  held 
by  people  who  are  six  to  eight  years  here.'  Most  of  those  who 
stick  rise,  a  fact  made  possible  by  the  heavy  turnover  at  the 
bottom:  the  proportion  of  higher  positions  to  those  who  com- 
pete for  them  is  relatively  favorable  for  advancement. 

If  anyone  is  to  rise  into  the  white-collar  ranks,  it  must  be 
from  wage-worker  levels.  What,  then,  are  the  chances  for  the 
wage-worker  to  rise  to  white-collar  status?  Suppose  we  consider 
an  unskilled  worker  making  about  $500  a  year  in  a  slump,  who 
loses  his  paltry  job,  can't  find  other  work,  and  goes  on  relief. 
There  were  many  in  this  situation;  in  the  middle  'thirties,  at 
least  one-third  of  the  unskilled  were  out  of  work. 

The  chances  that  this  man  will  become  ill  are  57  per  cent 
greater  than  those  of  a  higher  white-collar  man  making  $3000 
a  year;  moreover,  according  to  the  national  health  survey,  his 
illness  will  last  about  63  per  cent  longer.  If  the  white-collar  man 


276  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

(lid  become  ill,  he  would  get  46  per  cent  more  medical  attention 
than  the  unskilled  worker. 

Suppose  this  worker  gets  his  old  job  back  or  another  com- 
parable one,  and  his  wife  has  a  child,  Robert  Woodbury  has 
calculated  that  there  are  almost  three  times  as  many  chances 
that  this  child  will  die  before  he  is  one  year  old  than  is  the  case 
for  a  white-collar  man  making  only  a  little  better  than  $1250 
a  year.  But  if  the  worker's  child  does  live,  and  the  worker  remains 
an  unskilled  laborer,  what  are  the  child's  chances  to  rise? 

Many  working-class  parents  want  their  children  to  rise  above 
manual  labor,  but  few  know  anything  about  the  variety  of  jobs 
in  higher  spheres  or  the  preparation  required  for  them.  The 
child  himself  usually  has  few  convictions  about  the  value  of 
school,  which  to  him  is  merely  something  he  must  pass  through 
before  he  grows  up;  he  also  needs  more  spending  money  than 
his  parents  can  give  him.  His  chance  to  rise  out  of  manual  labor 
is  in  fact  very  slim  if  he  does  not  at  least  finish  high  school, 
but  he  doesn't  know  that  or  think  much  about  it.* 

The  son  of  an  unskilled  laborer  has  6  chances  in  100  of  ever 
getting  into  a  college;  the  son  of  a  professional  man  has  better 
than  a  50-50  chance.  But  only  10  per  cent  of  the  whole  adult 
population  in  1940  had  gone  to  college.  What  is  the  chance  of 
the  worker's  son  to  get  above  the  eighth  grade?  During  the 
'thirties  it  was  less  than  14  out  of  100. 

The  wage-worker's  children  leave  school  because  of  the  finan- 
cial need  of  the  family,  because  they  finish  high  school  or  trade 
school,  or  because  they  simply  'dislike  school.*  Probably  half 
have  no  specific  occupational  plan  or  ambition,  nor  do  many 
parents'  aspirations  go  beyond  the  vague  desire  to  see  the  chil- 
dren 'get  ahead'  or  get  as  much  schooling  as  possible.  They 
usually  find  out  about  their  first  job  by  random  applications  at 
work-places  or  through  acquaintances  and  relatives.  The  only 
thing  they  are  likely  to  know  about  these  jobs  before  beginning 
work  is  the  starting  wage,  and  the  majority  of  jobs,  perhaps  two- 
thirds,  are  blind  alleys. 

°  For  the  following  account,  I  have  drawn  extensively  on  L.  G. 
Reynold's  and  Joseph  Shister's  Job  Horizons  (New  York:  Harper, 
1949). 


SUCCESS  277 

When  that  first  job  ends,  or  the  workers  quit,  they  are  simply 
on  the  market  again,  with  lower  chances  of  obtaining  an  educa- 
tion and  hence  lower  chances  of  getting  a  better  job.  In  San  Jose, 
California,  the  unskilled  worker's  son,  in  58  cases  out  of  100, 
will  become  an  unskilled  or  a  semi-skilled  laborer.  Most  workers 
probably  leave  one  job  before  they  have  a  new  one  lined  up, 
and  they  do  not  have  the  opportunity  to  compare  jobs,  but  only 
the  choice  at  any  given  time  of  accepting  this  job  or  of  waiting 
to  see  if  a  better  one  turns  up. 

The  wage-worker  gets  married  early,  so  he  must  earn,  and  can- 
not think  seriously  of  training  for  skilled  work  during  the  first 
crucial  years  of  his  occupational  life.  By  the  time  he  is  twenty- 
five,  'the  orbit  in  which  he  will  move  for  the  rest  of  his  life  is 
firmly  established.'  He  is  interested  in  an  'agreeable  life  on  the 
job'  as  well  as  the  money  earned;  moreover,  his  judgment  of  his 
income  is  made  in  a  frame  of  comparison  with  the  wages  of  other 
workers  around  him.  The  status  value  of  the  work  is  in  his  mind 
when  he  considers  his  income,  but  the  money  becomes  more  im- 
portant as  he  acquires  more  dependent  children.  He  comes  to 
understand  that  the  good  job  is  scarce  and  he  develops  a  tech- 
nique for  hunting  such  jobs  by  depending  on  his  friends  for  'tips.' 
To  him,  a  change  of  jobs  does  not  mean  a  job  advancement,  as 
it  probably  does  to  more  secure  middle-class  people;  it  is  as 
likely  to  mean  the  personal  disaster  of  layoflF  or  unemployment. 

Roughly  one-third  of  the  wage-workers  prefer  to  remain  in 
their  present  jobs;  as  many  as  one-fourth  want  and  expect  to 
move  up  in  their  present  hierarchy;  others  who  would  like  to 
move  up,  don't  expect  to:  they  see  no  vacancies  in  sight,  believe 
they  lack  the  necessary  competence,  or  feel  themselves  too  old. 
In  their  daydreams  about  the  kind  of  work  they  would  really 
like,  workers  are  concerned  about  the  variety  of  work,  the  using 
of  skills,  and  contact  with  other  people;  as  many  want  white- 
collar  jobs  as  want  skilled  labor;  less  than  a  fifth  have  in  mind 
small  businesses.  We  have  already  seen  what  is  likely  to  happen 
to  the  0.2  per  cent  of  the  adult  population  who  try  to  start  small 
businesses  and  be  their  own  bosses,  and  we  know  that  farming 
is  now  an  economically  over-crowded  business.  Both  are  risky 
dreams,  which  now  affect  only  small  portions  of  the  population. 

Workers  do  not  aim  at  the  foreman's  job,  supposedly  their 


278  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

classic  ambition.  They  often  believe  that  gaining  such  a  job 
would  'upset  their  friendly  relations  with  other  workers.'  'If 
you're  a  foreman,  you've  got  to  get  so  much  work  out  of  men;  if 
you  know  a  man  is  holding  out,  you've  got  to  push  him  along. 
When  you  do  that  that  makes  you  a  no-good  guy  with  the  other 
men.'  'The  supervisors  have  no  friends.'  Others  don't  aspire  to 
a  foreman  position  because  it  'would  entail  too  much  responsi- 
bility'; or  wouldn't  'offer  enough  job  interest.'  'Foremen  today 
aren't  what  they  used  to  be  forty  years  ago.' 

The  ladder  for  workmen  today  is  not  the  lower  end  of  one 
general  ladder  leading  to  white-collar  levels;  it  is  a  shortened 
ladder  that  does  not  extend  above  the  wage-worker  level.  But 
that  does  not  mean  that  working  men  act  and  feel  as  their  inabil- 
ity to  follow  the  precepts  of  'getting  ahead'  might  lead  the  aca- 
demic and  inexperienced  to  expect.  The  wage-worker  comes  to 
limit  his  aspirations,  and  to  make  them  more  specific:  to  get 
more  money  for  this  job,  to  have  the  union  change  this  detail  or 
that  condition,  to  change  shifts  next  week.  In  the  meantime, 
hope  of  high  rates  of  upward  mobility  must  be  largely  confined 
to  those  who  begin  above  the  wage-worker  level. 

4.  Hard  Times 

Some  of  the  factors  that  make  for  upward  mobility  or  for  its 
decline  are  long-run,  but  many  are  geared  to  the  ups  and  downs 
of  the  economic  cycle.  The  old  ideology  of  success  assumed  that 
the  structure  of  opportunity  was  always  expanding:  the  heights 
to  be  gained  and  the  chances  of  gaining  them  seemed  to  increase 
from  one  generation  to  the  next  and  within  the  lifetime  of  a  man. 
Moreover,  these  opportunities  were  not  felt  to  be  threatened  by 
cyclical  ups  and  downs.  Virtually  everyone  could  feel  lifted  up- 
ward, both  in  income  and  status,  because  real  income  generally 
rose,  and  because  each  new  immigrant  group  coming  in  at  the 
bottom  lifted  the  prestige  and  jobs  of  many  who  had  arrived  be- 
fore them.  The  new  ideology  of  success  assumes  that  the  struc- 
ture of  opportunity  waxes  and  wanes  within  a  slump-war-boom 
economy.  Depressions  have  left  heavy  traces,  noticeable  even 
during  war  and  boom  when  opportunities  to  rise  become  more 
available. 


SUCCESS  279 

The  shift  from  an  economy  behaving  according  to  a  theory  of 
Hnear  progress  to  an  economy  behaving  according  to  theories 
of  cychcal  movement  has  affected  the  white-collar  strata  in  two 
direct  economic  ways:  (i)  their  income  levels,  especially  in  rela- 
tion to  those  of  wage-workers;  and  (ii)  their  security  of  employ- 
ment, again  in  relation  to  wage-workers. 

I.  In  1890,  as  we  have  already  noted,  the  average  income  of 
the  salaried  employee  was  roughly  double  that  of  the  average 
wage-worker.  From  then  until  the  First  World  War  the  salaried 
employees'  incomes  steadily  climbed,  whereas  the  climb  of  wage- 
workers'  earnings  was  slowed  by  the  depression  which  closed 
the  nineteenth  century  and  which  affected  wages  until  the  First 
World  War.  Thus,  in  the  early  twentieth  century  the  salaried 
employee's  advantage  over  the  wage-worker  was  solidly  based 
on  economic  facts.  The  white-collar  worlds  were  just  beginning 
to  expand,  so  new  and  wider  employment  opportunities  were 
continually  being  made  available  to  the  white-collar  employees 
who  held  a  monopoly  on  high-school  education.  There  were  no 
masses  of  white-collar  workers,  who,  as  a  stratum,  thus  occupied 
a  select  educational  and  occupational  position. 

World  War  I  boosted  the  incomes  of  both  wage-  and  salary- 
workers;  but  the  wage-workers,  perhaps  being  closer  to  war  pro- 
duction, being  unionized,  and  reaping  the  benefits  of  overtime 
pay,  had  greater  increases  in  income  than  did  salaried  employees. 
By  1920,  the  gap  between  wages  and  salaries  had  narrowed:  sal- 
aried workers  in  manufacturing  were  receiving  incomes  that  were 
only  65  per  cent  higher  than  those  of  wage-workers,  compared 
to  the  140  per  cent  advantage  of  1900. 

The  economic  dip  of  1921— the  lowest  year  of  employment  be- 
fore the  'thirties— hit  wage-workers  more  than  salaried  employees. 
Average  wages  in  manufacturing  dropped  13  per  cent;  salaries 
dropped  less  than  three-tenths  of  one  per  cent.  The  favorable 
employment  and  income  situation  of  the  white-collar  workers 
was  still  in  effect,  and  the  average  salaries  in  manufacturing 
again  rose  quickly,  by  1924  overtaking  their  1920  level.  The  in- 
comes of  wage-workers,  however,  throughout  the  'twenties  never 
regained  their  1920  level.  Hence,  salaried  workers  gained  over 


280  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

wage-workers,  although  their  advantage  was  not  so  great  as  in 
the  early  twentieth  century. 

Between  1929  and  1933,  average  wages  in  selected  industries 
dropped  33  per  cent,  salaries  dropped  20  per  cent.  The  slump  hit 
the  wage-workers  harder  than  the  white-collar  employees,  the 
income  differences  between  the  two  increasing  slightly.  The  sal- 
aries that  were  82  per  cent  higher  than  wages  in  1929  were  118 
per  cent  higher  in  1933.  But  the  threat  of  slump,  the  stigma  of 
unemployment,  and  the  anxieties  surrounding  it  definitely  in- 
vaded the  white-collar  ranks.  And  the  salary  advantage  held  by 
the  white-collar  employees  at  the  peak  unemployment  did  not 
last. 

World  War  II  benefited  wage-workers  more  than  salaried  em- 
ployees, the  difference  between  their  average  earnings  being  re- 
duced. But  the  end  of  the  war,  which  meant  no  more  overtime  in 
factories,  benefited  salaried  more  than  wage-workers.  Figures  for 
1939  and  1948  are  interesting,  because  they  suggest  long-term 
changes  affected  by  the  war,  but  not  due  to  temporary  disloca- 
tions of  war-time  conditions.  In  each  of  these  years,  the  income 
of  the  white-collar  mass— the  office  and  sales  people— was  lower 
than  that  of  the  skilled  urban  wage-workers.  These  lower  white- 
collar  workers,  however,  held  a  margin  of  advantage  over  the 
semi-skilled,  although  it  had  definitely  decreased.*  The  white- 
collar  income  margin  over  wage-workers  has  become  less,  and 
whatever  margin  they  still  have  as  a  group  will  most  likely  be 
further  decreased  in  the  coming  decade.  For  it  is  during  inflated 
periods,  when  salaries  seem  more  rigid  than  wages,  that  white- 
collar  leveling  is  most  likely  to  occur. 

n.  Historical  information  on  unemployment  in  the  United 
States  is  fragmentary,  contradictory,  and  hard  to  come  by,  but  it 
seems  likely  that  before  the  'thirties,  with  the  possible  exception 

*  OflBce-men  in  1939,  for  example,  received  incomes  40  per  cent 
higher  than  those  of  semi-skilled  male  workers;  in  1948,  only  9.5  per 
cent  higher.  Salesmen's  incomes  in  1939  were  19  per  cent  higher  than 
those  of  semi-skilled  male  workers;  in  1948,  only  4  per  cent.  Among 
women,  the  advantage  of  oflBce  employees  over  semi-skilled  workers 
was  68  per  cent  in  1939  but  only  22  per  cent  in  1948;  saleswomen, 
however,  saw  their  incomes  drop  below  the  level  of  women  semi- 
skilled workers  in  1948. 


SUCCESS  281 

of  1921,  unemployment  had  involved  considerably  less  than  10 
per  cent  of  the  total  labor  force.  Employment  was  at  its  lowest 
point  in  1933,  when  12.8  million  workers,  or  25  per  cent  of  the 
labor  force,  were  out  of  work  or  on  relief.  By  1936,  17  per  cent 
of  the  labor  force  was  still  unemployed,  and  unemployment 
stayed  near  this  level  until  the  onset  of  World  War  II.  Then,  un- 
employment declined  sharply  each  year  until  it  hit  its  war-time 
low  of  less  than  1  per  cent  of  the  labor  force  in  1944. 

White-collar  employees  are  no  longer  as  immune  to  crises  of 
unemployment  as  they  once  were,  but  so  far  unemployment  has 
been  heavier  among  wage-workers.  In  1930  probably  4  per  cent 
of  the  new  middle  class  were  unemployed,  compared  with  over 
10  per  cent  of  the  skilled  and  semi-skilled  and  about  13  per  cent 
of  the  urban  unskilled  workers.  These  figures  reveal  only  the  be- 
ginnings of  the  slump;  by  1937  the  worst  was  over,*  but  in  that 
year  about  11  per  cent  of  the  oflBce  and  sales  people  were  out  of 
work  or  on  public  emergency  work,  compared  with  from  16  to 
27  per  cent  of  the  urban  wage-workers.  So  the  white-collar  mar- 
gin of  job  security  was  probably  narrowed  during  the  ten  years 
before  World  War  11. 

Yet,  historically,  white-collar  employees  have  been  more  pro- 
tected than  wage-workers  from  unemployment.  In  large  part  this 
may  be  due  to  the  special  character  of  white-collar  work:  'The 
volume  of  paper  work  doesn't  shrink  automatically  when  produc- 
tion falls  oflF,'  the  editors  of  Business  Week  observe.  'Sometimes 
it  even  increases— because  the  company  puts  on  more  selling  pres- 
sure to  round  up  new  orders.'  Nevertheless,  many  of  the  factors 
that  have  protected  the  white-collar  workers  are  probably  weak- 
ening in  force.  During  the  'thirties  white-collar  offices  and  sales- 
rooms were  less  mechanized  than  now;  as  offices  have  been  en- 
larged, they  have  become  'an  increased  cost'  of  the  business 
enterprise.  In  future  depressions,  therefore,  the  incentive  to  cut 
down  oSice  costs  by  increased  mechanization  and  white-collar 
layoffs  will  be  greater  than  in  the  past.  Furthermore,  many  white- 
collar  jobs  have  required  more  training  than  they  do  now,  and 
employers  have  been  reluctant  to  let  trained  personnel  go.  In  the 
future,  however,  as  more  white-collar  jobs  are  routinized,  and 

*  No  reliable  nation-wide  figures  for  1933  and  1934  are  available. 


282  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

the  people  in  them  are  more  easily  replaceable,  this  reluctance 
will  be  minimized.  The  general  educational  requirements  for 
white-collar  work  are  also  becoming  more  widely  available.  Thus 
there  are  more  people  available  to  perform  easier  tasks,  and  the 
possibility  of  unemployment  increases.  Present  conditions  within 
the  white-collar  world,  continuing  and  emphasizing  the  historical 
trend,  thus  point  to  a  lesser  margin  of  employment  security  be- 
tween wage-workers  and  white-collar  employees. 

5.  The  Tarnished  Image 

In  the  last  twenty  years,  a  new  style  in  inspirational  literature, 
relevant  to  a  new  style  of  aspiration,  has  risen  in  the  United 
States.  This  literature  does  not  provide  its  large  readership  with 
techniques  for  cultivating  the  old  middle-class  virtues,  nor  the 
techniques  for  selling  oneself,  although,  like  other  inspirational 
material,  it  is  concerned  with  the  individual  rather  than  society. 
It  emphasizes  peace  of  mind  and  various  physical  and  spiritual 
ways  of  relaxation,  rather  than  internal  frenzy  in  the  service  of 
external  and  known  ambitions.  As  a  literature  of  resignation,  it 
strives  to  control  goals  and  ways  of  life  by  lowering  the  level  of 
ambition,  and  by  replacing  the  older  goals  with  more  satisfying 
internal  goals. 

This  is  accomplished,  negatively,  by  tarnishing  the  old  images 
of  success.  In  The  Hucksters,  The  Gilded  Hearse,  Death  of  a 
Salesman,  The  Big  Wheel,  the  externally  successful  are  por- 
trayed as  internal  failures,  as  obnoxious,  guilt-ridden,  ulcerated 
people  of  uneasy  conscience,  at  war  with  all  the  peaceful  virtues 
of  the  old  life  and,  above  all,  miserably  at  war  with  their  tor- 
mented selves.  T  tried  to  tell  myself  to  snap  out  of  it,'  says  a 
James  M.  Cain  hero,  in  The  Moth,  'that  I  had  everything  I  had 
ever  wanted,  a  dream  job,  big  dough,  the  respect  of  the  busi- 
ness I  was  in.  I  had  a  car,  a  Packard  that  just  floated.  I  had  an 
apartment  looking  right  over  the  ocean.  .  .  I  had  a  woman  with 
every  kind  of  looks  there  was  .  .  .  And  yet,  if  it  was  what  I  had 
been  thirsty  for,  it  never  came  clear,  really  to  quench  thirst,  but 
had  bubbles  in  it,  like  .  .  .  champagne.  .  .  I  felt  like  life  was 
nothing  but  one  long  string  of  Christmas  afternoons.  .  .  I  felt 


SUCCESS  283 

big  and  cruel  and  cold,  a  thick,  heavy-shouldered  bunch  of  what- 
ever it  takes  to  be  success.' 

Positively,  the  new  literature  of  inspiration  holds  out  internal 
virtues,  in  line  with  a  relaxed  consumer's  life  rather  than  a  tense 
producer's.  It  is  the  spiritual  value,  even  of  material  poverty, 
available  to  everyone,  which  a  Reader's  Digest  or  a  Peace  of 
Mind  philosophy  exemplifies.  These  are  not  the  old  sober  virtues 
of  thrift  and  industry,  nor  the  drive  and  style  of  the  displayed 
personality,  nor  the  educated  skills  of  the  bureaucratic  profes- 
sions. These  are  virtues  which  go  with  resignation,  and  the  lit- 
erature of  resignation  justifies  the  lowering  of  ambition  and  the 
slackening  of  the  old  frenzy. 

If  men  are  responsible  for  their  success,  they  are  also  responsi- 
ble for  their  failure;  if  success  is  an  individual  specification  of 
social  progress,  failure  is  an  individual  specification  of  declining 
opportunities.  But  regardless  of  its  true  source,  failure  in  the 
literature  of  success  is  seen  as  willful,  is  imputed  to  the  indi- 
vidual, and  is  often  internalized  by  him  as  guilt,  as  a  competitive 
dissatisfaction.  The  imperative  to  keep  trying,  not  to  slacken  oflF, 
results  in  anxiety.  But  in  the  literature  of  resignation,  such  anxi- 
eties are  relieved,  not  by  an  external  success  which  is  considered 
to  lead  to  personal  unhappiness,  but  by  an  internalization  of  the 
goals  of  success  themselves.  'We  write  successful  stories  about 
unsuccessful  people,'  says  soap-opera  producer  Frank  Hummert. 
'This  means  that  our  characters  are  simply  unsuccessful  in  the 
material  things  of  life,  but  highly  successful  spiritually.' 

The  literature  of  the  peace  of  the  inner  man  fits  in  with  the 
alienating  process  that  has  shifted  men  from  a  focus  upon  pro- 
duction to  a  focus  upon  consumption.  The  old  success  models 
indicated  the  opportunities  open  to  everyone,  were  intended  to 
prompt  the  will  to  action,  and  paid  attention  to  all  sorts  of  per- 
sonal means  to  their  end.  If  they  held  out  the  end-image  of  Acres 
of  Diamonds,  they  also  made  those  acres  seem  a  natural  result  of 
hard,  productive  work,  or,  later,  of  guileful  tricks:  at  any  rate,  of 
something  the  individual  could  do  or  some  change  he  could  make 
in  himself.  But  now,  as  the  ambition  of  many  people  solidifies  into 
the  unreasoning  conscientiousness  of  the  good  employee  or  be- 
comes lost  in  consumer  dreams,  ambition  is  often  displayed  in 
movies  and  novels  as  a  drive  polluting  men  and  leading  them  to 


284  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

bad  choices.  Success  entails  cash,  clothes,  cars,  and  lush  women 
with  couch  voices,  but  it  also  inevitably  means  a  loss  of  integrity 
and,  in  the  extreme,  insanity.  For  there  is  a  furor  about  the  am- 
bitious man,  the  man  dead-bent  on  success.  Increasingly  we  are 
shown  The  Successful  ending  up  broken,  in  at  least  some  internal 
way.  Success  is  the  dead  end  of  an  easy  street.  And  when  we  are 
shown  the  means  of  success  they  are  as  likely  to  be  frankly 
miraculous  as  the  result  of  personal  effort  or  sacrifice;  as  likely 
to  be  due  to  a  magical  stroke  of  luck,  which  suddenly  turns  the 
blind  alley  into  an  open  prairie,  as  to  personal  virtue  or  intel- 
ligence. 

Just  as  the  'lucky  stroke'  magically  bolsters  hope  in  an  increas- 
ingly limited  structure  of  opportunity,  so  the  idea  of  the  'bad 
break'  softens  feelings  of  individual  failure.  Life  as  a  game,  as  a 
sort  of  lottery  brotherhood  out  of  which  the  main  chance  will 
come— these  correspond  to  the  tightening  up  of  stratification  and 
the  increased  difficulty  of  climbing  up  the  ladder  for  those  born 
under  the  lower  rungs.  Success  for  many  has  'become  an  acci- 
dental and  irrational  event,'  and  as  a  goal  has  become  so  daz- 
zling that  the  individual  is  absorbed  in  contemplating  it,  en- 
joying it  vicariously. 

'The  distance  between  what  an  average  individual  may  do  and 
the  forces  and  powers  that  determine  his  life  and  death  has  be- 
come so  unbridgeable  that  identification  with  normalcy,  even 
with  Philistine  boredom,  becomes  a  readily  grasped  empire  of 
refuge  and  escape,'  observes  Leo  Lowenthal.  'It  is  some  comfort 
for  the  little  man  who  has  become  expelled  from  the  Horatio 
Alger  dream,  who  despairs  of  penetrating  the  thicket  of  grand 
•strategy  in  politics  and  business,  to  see  his  heroes  as  a  lot  of  guys 
who  like  or  dislike  highballs,  cigarettes,  tomato  juice,  golf  and 
social  gatherings— just  like  himself.  He  knows  how  to  converse 
in  the  sphere  of  consumption  and  here  he  can  make  no  mistakes.' 

Before  capitalism,  men  found  their  occupational  level  by  tradi- 
tion and  inheritance;  jobs  were  passed  on  from  father  to  son,  by 
means  of  caste  rank;  or,  as  in  feudalism  or  peasant  societies,  each 
man  did  nearly  identical  work.  Under  liberal  capitalism,  men 
found  their  places  in  the  division  of  labor  by  competing  on  an 
open  market.  They  put  their  skills  and  efforts  on  the  market,  to 


SUCCESS  285 

acquire  enterprises  or  jobs,  and  there  were  no  formal  or  tradi- 
tional bounds  to  the  extent  of  their  rise.  Now,  the  market  begins 
to  close,  and  men  to  come  under  restrictions  and  guidance.  Eco- 
nomic rigidities  Hmit  ascent,  property  inheritance  or  educational 
training  become  necessary  to  occupational  success.  Increasingly, 
there  are  attempts  to  guide  by  test  and  counsel,  and  various  oc- 
cupational markets  are  closed  up  by  professional  associations, 
unions,  state  licensing  systems. 

The  vocational  guide  studies  individuals  and  jobs,  aiming  to  fit 
the  one  into  the  other.  To  the  extent  that  he  succeeds,  voca- 
tional choice  rests  upon  his  studies  and  consequent  advice,  rather 
than  upon  the  random  wishes  or  'uninformed'  desires  of  the  indi- 
vidual. Where  ambition  and  initiative  are  stressed  and  yet  so 
many  people  must  work  below  their  capacities,  the  problem  of 
frustration  becomes  very  large.  For  the  goals  to  which  men  aspire 
can  be  reached  by  only  a  few.  Educators  and  those  who  run  edu- 
cational institutions  become  concerned:  they  must  help  children 
to  construct  Valid  ambitions,'  they  must  put  the  brakes  on  am- 
bition, regulate  the  plans  of  youth  in  accordance  with  what  is 
possible  within  the  present  society— practice  a  more  careful,  a 
more  centralized  management  of  ambition. 

There  is  a  curious  contradiction  about  the  ethos  of  success  in 
America  today.  On  the  one  hand,  there  are  still  compulsions  to 
struggle,  to  'amount  to  something';  on  the  other,  there  is  a  pov- 
erty of  desire,  a  souring  of  the  image  of  success. 

The  literature  of  resignation,  of  the  peace  of  the  inner  man, 
fits  in  with  all  those  institutional  changes  involving  the  goal  of 
security  and  collective  ways  of  achieving  it.  As  insecurities  be- 
come widespread  and  their  sources  beyond  the  individual's  con- 
trol, as  they  become  collective  insecurities,  the  population  has 
groped  for  collective  means  of  regaining  individual  security.  The 
most  dramatic  means  has  been  the  labor  union,  but  demands  on 
government  have  resulted  in  social  security,  and  increasingly  the 
government  intervenes  to  shape  the  structure  of  opportimity. 
The  governmental  pension  is  clearly  of  another  type  of  society 
than  the  standard  American  dream.  The  old  end  was  an  inde- 
pendent prosperity,  happily  surrounded  by  one's  grandchildren; 
the  end  now  envisioned  is  a  pensioned  security  independent  of 
one's  grandchildren.  When  men  fight  for  pensions,  they  assume 


286  STYLES  OF  LIFE 

that  security  must  be  guaranteed  by  group  provision.  No  longer 
can  the  $5000-a-year  man  work  twenty-five  years  and  retire  inde- 
pendently on  $3000. 

Of  course,  governments  have  always  guaranteed  and  modified 
class  chances,  by  the  laws  of  property,  by  land  policies  and 
tariffs;  but  now  the  tendency  of  New  Deals  and  Welfare  States  is 
to  modify  the  class  chances  of  lower  groups  upward,  and  of 
higher  groups  downward,  by  minimum-wage  laws,  graduated  in- 
come tax,  social  security;  and,  except  during  wars,  to  guarantee 
minimum  life  chances,  regardless  of  class  level.  Thus  do  govern- 
ments intervene  to  keep  men  more  equal. 


FOUR 

Ways  of  Power 


13 


The  New  Middle  Class,  II 


Ever  since  the  new  middle  class  began  numerically  to  displace 
the  old,  its  political  role  has  been  an  object  of  query  and  debate. 
The  political  question  has  been  closely  linked  with  another— 
that  of  the  position  of  new  middle-class  occupations  in  modern 
stratification. 

This  linkage  of  politics  and  stratification  was  all  the  more  to  be 
expected  inasmuch  as  the  white-collar  man  as  a  sociological  crea- 
ture was  first  discovered  by  Marxian  theoreticians  in  search  of 
recruits  for  the  proletarian  movement.  They  expected  that  society 
would  be  polarized  into  class-conscious  proletariat  and  bour- 
geoisie, that  in  their  general  decline  the  in-between  layers  would 
choose  one  side  or  the  other— or  at  least  keep  out  of  the  way  of 
the  major  protagonists.  Neither  of  these  expectations,  however, 
had  been  realized  when  socialist  theoreticians  and  party  bureau- 
crats began  at  the  opening  of  the  present  century  to  tinker  with 
the  classic  perspective. 

In  trying  to  line  up  the  new  population  into  those  who  could 
and  those  who  could  not  be  relied  upon  to  support  their  struggle, 
party  statisticians  ran  squarely  into  the  numerical  upsiu-ge  of  the 
white-collar  salariat.  The  rise  of  these  groups  as  a  problem  for 
Marxists  signalized  a  shift  from  the  simple  property  versus  no- 
property  dichotomy  to  differentiations  within  the  no-property 
groups.  It  focused  attention  upon  occupational  structure.  More- 
over, in  examining  white-collar  groups,  along  with  the  persistent 
small  entrepreneurs  of  farm  and  city,  they  came  upon  the  further 
fact  that  although  the  new  middle  class  was  propertyless,  and 

289 


290  WAYS  OF  POWER 

the  smaller  entrepreneurs  often  suffered  economic  downgrading, 
members  of  these  strata  did  not  readily  take  to  the  socialist  ide- 
ology. Their  political  attachments  did  not  coincide  with  their 
economic  position,  and  certainly  not  with  their  imminently  ex- 
pected position.  They  represented  a  numerical  upthrust  of  falsely 
conscious  people,  and  they  were  an  obstacle  to  the  scheduled 
course  of  the  revolution. 

1.  Theories  and  Difficulties 

To  relate  in  detail  all  the  theories  that  followed  upon  these 
discoveries  and  speculations  would  be  more  monotonous  than 
fruitful;  the  range  of  theory  had  been  fairly  well  laid  out  by  the 
middle  'twenties,  and  nothing  really  new  has  since  been  added. 
Various  writers  have  come  upon  further  detail,  some  of  it  cru- 
cial, or  have  variously  combined  the  major  positions,  some  of 
which  have  had  stronger  support  than  others.  But  the  political 
directions  that  can  be  inferred  from  the  existence  of  the  new 
middle  class  may  be  sorted  out  into  four  major  possibilities. 

I.  The  new  middle  class,  in  whole  or  in  some  crucial  seg- 
ment, will  continue  to  grow  in  numbers  and  in  power;  in  due 
course  it  will  develop  into  a  politically  independent  class.  Dis- 
placing other  classes  in  performance  of  the  pivotal  functions  re- 
quired to  run  modern  society,  it  is  slated  to  be  the  next  ruling 
class.  The  accent  will  be  upon  the  new  middle  class;  the  next 
epoch  will  be  theirs. 

n.  The  new  middle  classes  will  continue  to  grow  in  numbers 
and  power,  and  although  they  will  not  become  a  force  that  will 
rise  to  independent  power,  they  will  be  a  major  force  for  sta- 
bility in  the  general  balance  of  the  different  classes.  As  important 
elements  in  the  class  balance,  they  will  make  for  the  continuance 
of  liberal  capitalist  society.  Their  spread  checks  the  creeping  pro- 
letarianization; they  act  as  a  bujBFer  between  labor  and  capital. 
Taking  over  certain  functions  of  the  old  middle  class,  but  having 
connections  with  the  wage-workers,  they  will  be  able  to  co-oper- 
ate with  them  too;  thus  they  bridge  class  contrasts  and  mitigate 
class  conflicts.  They  are  the  balance  wheel  of  class  interests,  the 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  II  291 

stabilizers,  the  social  harmonizers.  They  are  intermediaries  of  the 
new  social  solidarity  that  will  put  an  end  to  class  bickering.  That 
is  why  they  are  catered  to  by  any  camp  or  movement  that  is 
on  its  way  to  electoral  power,  or,  for  that  matter,  attempted 
revolution. 

ui.  Members  of  the  new  middle  class,  by  their  social  character 
and  political  outlook,  are  really  bourgeoisie  and  they  will  remain 
that.  This  is  particularly  apparent  in  the  tendency  of  these  groups 
to  become  status  groups  rather  than  mere  economic  classes.  They 
will  form,  as  in  Nazi  Germany,  prime  human  materials  for  con- 
servative, for  reactionary,  and  even  for  fascist,  movements.  They 
are  natural  allies  and  shock  troops  of  the  larger  capitalist  drive. 

rv.  The  new  middle  class  will  follow  the  classic  Marxian 
scheme:  in  due  course,  it  will  become  homogeneous  in  all  impor- 
tant respects  with  the  proletariat  and  will  come  over  to  their  so- 
cialist policy.  In  the  meantime,  it  represents— for  various  reasons, 
which  will  be  washed  away  in  crises  and  decline— a  case  of  de- 
layed reaction.  For  in  historical  reahty,  the  'new  middle  class'  is 
merely  a  peculiar  sort  of  new  proletariat,  having  the  same  basic 
interests.  With  the  intensification  of  the  class  struggle  between 
the  real  classes  of  capitalist  society,  it  will  be  swept  into  the  pro- 
letarian ranks.  A  thin,  upper  layer  may  go  over  to  the  bour- 
geoisie, but  it  will  not  count  in  numbers  or  in  power. 

These  various  arguments  are  difficult  to  compare,  first  of  all 
because  they  do  not  all  include  the  same  occupations  under  the 
catchword  'new  middle  class.'  When  we  consider  the  vague 
boundary  lines  of  the  white-collar  world,  we  can  easily  under- 
stand why  such  an  occupational  salad  invites  so  many  conflict- 
ing theories  and  why  general  images  of  it  are  likely  to  differ. 
There  is  no  one  accepted  word  for  them;  white  collar,  salaried 
employee,  new  middle  class  are  used  interchangeably.  During 
the  historical  span  covered  by  different  theories,  the  occupational 
groups  composing  these  strata  have  changed;  and  at  given  times, 
different  theorists  in  pursuit  of  bolstering  data  have  spotlighted 
one  or  the  other  groups  composing  the  total.  So  contrasting 
images  of  the  political  role  of  the  white-collar  people  can  readily 


292  WAYS  OF  POWER 

exist  side  by  side  (and  perhaps  even  both  be  correct).  Those, 
for  instance,  who  believe  that  as  the  vanguard  stratum  of  modem 
society  they  are  slated  to  be  the  next  ruling  class  do  not  think  of 
them  as  ten-cent  store  clerks,  insurance-agents,  and  stenog- 
raphers, but  rather  as  higher  technicians  and  staff  engineers,  as 
salaried  managers  of  business  cartels  and  big  oflBcials  of  the  Fed- 
eral Government.  On  the  other  hand,  those  who  hold  that  they 
are  being  proletarianized  do  focus  upon  the  mass  of  clerklings 
and  sales  people,  while  those  who  see  their  role  as  in-between 
mediators  are  most  likely  to  include  both  upper  and  lower 
ranges.  At  any  rate,  in  descriptions  in  Part  Two,  we  have  split 
the  stratum  as  a  whole  into  at  least  four  sub-strata  or  pyramids, 
and  we  must  pay  attention  to  this  split  as  we  try  to  place  white- 
collar  people  in  our  political  expectations. 

Most  of  the  work  that  has  been  done  on  the  new  middle  class 
and  its  political  role  involves  more  general  theories  of  the  course 
of  capitalist  development.  That  is  why  it  is  difiBcult  to  sort  out 
in  a  simple  and  yet  systematic  way  what  given  writers  really 
think  of  the  white-collar  people.  Their  views  are  based  not  on  an 
examination  of  this  stratum  as  much  as  on,  first,  the  political  pro- 
gram they  happen  to  be  following;  second,  the  doctrinal  position, 
as  regards  the  political  line-up  of  classes,  they  have  previously 
accepted;  and  third,  their  judgment  in  regard  to  the  main  course 
of  twentieth-century  industrial  society. 

Proletarian  purists  would  disavow  white-collar  people;  United 
Fronters  would  link  at  least  segments  of  them  with  workers  in  a 
fight  over  specific  issues,  while  carefully  preserving  organiza- 
tional and,  above  all,  doctrinal  independence;  People's  Fronters 
would  cater  to  them  by  modifying  wage-worker  ideology  and 
program  in  order  to  unite  the  two;  liberals  of  'Populist'  inclina- 
tion, in  a  sort  of  dogmatic  pluralism,  would  call  upon  them  along 
with  small  businessmen,  small  farmers,  and  all  grades  of  wage- 
workers  to  coalesce.  And  each  camp,  if  it  prevailed  long  enough 
for  its  intellectuals  to  get  into  production,  would  evolve  theories 
about  the  character  of  the  white-collar  people  and  the  role  they 
are  capable  of  playing. 

As  for  political  doctrines,  the  very  definition  of  the  white-collar 
problem  has  usually  assumed  as  given  a  more  or  less  rigid  frame- 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  II  293 

work  of  fated  classes.  The  belief  that  in  any  future  struggle  be- 
tween big  business  and  labor,  the  weight  of  the  white-collar 
workers  will  be  decisive  assumes  that  there  is  going  to  be  a 
future  struggle,  in  the  open,  between  business  and  labor.  The 
question  of  whether  they  will  be  either  proletariat  or  bourgeoisie, 
thus  in  either  case  giving  up  whatever  identity  they  may  already 
have,  or  go  their  independent  way,  assumes  that  there  are  these 
other  sides  and  that  their  struggle  will,  in  fact  if  not  in  con- 
sciousness, make  up  the  real  political  arena.  Yet,  at  the  same 
time,  the  theories  to  which  the  rise  of  the  new  middle  class  has 
given  birth  distinguish  various,  independent  sectors  of  the  pro- 
letariat and  of  the  bourgeoisie,  suggesting  that  the  unit  of  anal- 
ysis has  been  overformalized.  The  problem  of  the  new  middle 
class  must  now  be  raised  in  a  context  that  does  not  merely 
assume  homogeneous  blocs  of  classes. 

The  political  argument  over  white-collar  workers  has  gone  on 
over  an  international  scale.  Although  modem  nations  do  have 
many  trends  in  common— among  them  certainly  the  statistical 
increase  of  the  white-collar  workers— they  also  have  unique  fea- 
tures. In  posing  the  question  of  the  political  role  of  white-collar 
people  in  the  United  States,  we  must  learn  all  we  can  from  dis- 
cussions of  them  in  other  countries,  the  Weimar  Republic  espe- 
cially, but  in  doing  so,  we  must  take  everything  hypothetically 
and  test  it  against  U.S.  facts  and  trends. 

The  time-span  of  various  theories  and  expectations,  as  we  have 
noted,  has  in  most  of  the  arguments  not  been  closely  specified. 
Those  who  hold  the  view  that  white-collar  workers  are  really 
only  an  odd  sort  of  proletariat  and  will,  in  due  course,  begin  to 
behave  accordingly,  or  the  view  that  the  new  middle  class  is 
slated  to  be  the  next  ruling  class  have  worked  with  flexible  and 
often  conflicting  schedules. 

What  has  been  at  issue  in  these  theories  is  the  objective  posi- 
tion of  the  new  middle  classes  within  and  between  the  various 
strata  of  modem  society,  and  the  political  content  and  direction 
of  their  mentahty.  Questions  concerning  either  of  these  issues 
can  be  stated  in  such  a  way  as  to  allow,  and  in  fact  demand, 
observational  answers  only  if  adequate  conceptions  of  stratifica- 
tion and  of  political  mentality  are  clearly  set  forth. 


294  WAYS  OF  POWER 

2.  Mentalities 

It  is  frequently  asserted,  in  theories  of  the  white-collar  people, 
that  there  are  no  classes  in  the  United  States  because  'psychol- 
ogy is  of  the  essence  of  classes'  or,  as  Alfred  Bingham  has  put  it, 
that  'class  groupings  are  always  nebulous,  and  in  the  last  analysis 
only  the  vague  thing  called  class-consciousness  counts/  It  is  said 
that  people  in  the  United  States  are  not  aware  of  themselves  as 
members  of  classes,  do  not  identify  themselves  with  their  appro- 
priate economic  level,  do  not  often  organize  in  terms  of  these 
brackets  or  vote  along  the  lines  they  provide.  America,  in  this 
reasoning,  is  a  sandheap  of  'middle-class  individuals.' 

But  this  is  to  confuse  psychological  feelings  with  other  kinds 
of  social  and  economic  reality.  Because  men  are  not  'class  con- 
scious' at  all  times  and  in  all  places  does  not  mean  that  'there 
are  no  classes'  or  that  'in  America  everybody  is  middle  class.'  The 
economic  and  social  facts  are  one  thing;  psychological  feelings 
may  or  may  not  be  associated  with  them  in  expected  ways.  Both 
are  important,  and  if  psychological  feelings  and  political  out- 
looks do  not  correspond  to  economic  class,  we  must  try  to  find 
out  why,  rather  than  throw  out  the  economic  baby  with  the  psy- 
chological bath,  and  so  fail  to  understand  how  either  fits  into  the 
national  tub.  No  matter  what  people  believe,  class  structure  as 
an  economic  arrangement  influences  their  life  chances  according 
to  their  positions  in  it.  If  they  do  not  grasp  the  causes  of  their 
conduct  this  does  not  mean  that  the  social  analyst  must  ignore 
or  deny  them. 

If  political  mentalities  are  not  in  Ime  with  objectively  defined 
strata,  that  lack  of  correspondence  is  a  problem  to  be  explained; 
in  fact,  it  is  the  grand  problem  of  the  psychology  of  social  strata. 
The  general  problem  of  stratification  and  political  mentality  has 
to  do  with  the  extent  to  which  the  members  of  objectively  defined 
strata  are  homogeneous  in  their  political  alertness,  outlook,  and 
allegiances,  and  with  the  degree  to  which  their  political  mentality 
and  actions  are  in  line  with  the  interests  demanded  by  the  juxta- 
position of  their  objective  position  and  their  accepted  values. 

To  understand  the  occupation,  class,  and  status  positions  of  a 
set  of  people  is  not  necessarily  to  know  whether  or  not  they 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  II  295 

(1)  will  become  class-conscious,  feeling  that  they  belong  to- 
gether or  that  they  can  best  realize  their  rational  interests  by 
combining;  (2)  will  organize  themselves,  or  be  open  to  organi- 
zation by  others,  into  associations,  movements,  or  political  par- 
ties; (3)  will  have  'collective  attitudes'  of  any  sort,  including 
those  toward  themselves,  their  common  situation;  or  (4)  will 
become  hostile  toward  other  strata  and  struggle  against  them. 
These  social,  political,  and  psychological  characteristics  may 
or  may  not  occur  on  the  basis  of  similar  objective  situations.  In 
any  given  case,  such  possibilities  must  be  explored,  and  'subjec- 
tive' attributes  must  not  be  used  as  criteria  for  class  inclusion, 
but  rather,  as  Max  Weber  has  made  clear,  stated  as  probabilities 
on  the  basis  of  objectively  defined  situations. 

Implicit  in  this  way  of  stating  the  issues  of  stratification  lies 
a  model  of  social  movements  and  political  dynamics.  The  im- 
portant diflFerences  among  people  are  differences  that  shape  their 
biographies  and  ideas;  within  any  given  stratum,  of  course,  in- 
dividuals differ,  but  if  their  stratum  has  been  adequately  under- 
stood, we  can  expect  certain  psychological  traits  to  recur.  The 
probability  that  people  will  have  a  similar  mentality  and  ideol- 
ogy, and  that  they  will  join  together  for  action,  is  increased  the 
more  homogeneous  they  are  with  respect  to  class,  occupation, 
and  prestige.  Other  factors  do,  of  course,  affect  the  probability 
that  ideology,  organization,  and  consciousness  will  occur  among 
those  in  objectively  similar  strata.  But  psychological  factors  are 
likely  to  be  associated  with  strata,  which  consist  of  people  who 
are  characterized  by  an  intersection  of  the  several  dimensions 
we  have  been  using:  class,  occupation,  status,  and  power.  The 
task  is  to  sort  out  these  dimensions  of  stratification  in  a  sys- 
tematic way,  paying  attention  to  each  separately  and  then  to  its 
relation  to  each  of  the  other  dimensions. 

The  question  whether  the  white-collar  workers  are  a  'new 
middle  class,'  or  a  'new  working  class,'  or  what  not,  is  not  entirely 
one  of  definition,  but  its  empirical  solution  is  made  possible  only 
by  clarified  definitions.  The  meaning  of  the  term  'proletarianized,' 
around  which  the  major  theories  have  revolved,  is  by  no  means 
clear.  In  the  definitions  we  have  used,  however,  proletarianization 
might  refer  to  shifts  of  middle-class  occupations  toward  wage- 


296  WAYS  OF  POWER 

workers  in  terms  of:  income,  property,  skill,  prestige  or  power, 
irrespective  of  whether  or  not  the  people  involved  are  aware  of 
these  changes.  Or,  the  meaning  may  be  in  terms  of  changes  in 
consciousness,  outlook,  or  organized  activity.  It  would  be  pos- 
sible, for  example,  for  a  segment  of  the  white-collar  people  to 
become  virtually  identical  with  wage-workers  in  income,  prop- 
erty, and  skill,  but  to  resist  being  like  them  in  prestige  claims 
and  to  anchor  their  whole  consciousness  upon  illusory  prestige 
factors.  Only  by  keeping  objective  position  and  ideological  con- 
sciousness separate  in  analysis  can  the  problem  be  stated  with 
precision  and  without  unjustifiable  assumptions  about  wage- 
workers,  white-collar  workers,  and  the  general  psychology  of 
social  classes. 

When  the  Marxist,  Anton  Pannekoek  for  example,  refuses  to 
include  propertyless  people  of  lower  income  than  skilled  workers 
in  the  proletariat,  he  refers  to  ideological  and  prestige  factors. 
He  does  not  go  on  to  refer  to  the  same  factors  as  they  operate 
among  the  proletariat,'  because  he  holds  to  what  can  only  be 
called  a  metaphysical  belief  that  the  proletariat  is  destined  to 
win  through  to  a  certain  consciousness.  Those  who  see  white- 
collar  groups  as  composing  an  independent  'class,'  sui  generis, 
often  use  prestige  or  status  as  their  defining  criterion  rather  than 
economic  level.  The  Marxian  assertion,  for  example  L.  B.  Bou- 
din's,  that  salaried  employees  'are  in  reality  just  as  much  a  part 
of  the  proletariat  as  the  merest  day-laborer,'  obviously  rests  on 
economic  criteria,  as  is  generally  recognized  when  his  statement 
is  countered  by  the  assertion  that  he  ignores  'important  psycho- 
logical factors.' 

The  Marxist  in  his  expectation  assumes,  first,  that  wage-work- 
ers, or  at  least  large  sections  of  them,  do  in  fact,  or  v^l  at  any 
moment,  have  a  socialist  consciousness  of  their  revolutionary  role 
in  modem  history.  He  assumes,  secondly,  that  the  middle  classes, 
or  large  sections  of  them,  are  acquiring  this  consciousness,  and 
in  this  respect  are  becoming  like  the  wage-workers  or  like  what 
wage-workers  are  assumed  to  be.  Third,  he  rests  his  contention 
primarily  upon  the  assumption  that  the  economic  dimension, 
especially  property,  of  stratification  is  the  key  one,  and  that  it  is 
in  this  dimension  that  the  middle  classes  are  becoming  like  wage- 
workers. 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  II  297 

But  the  fact  that  propertyless  employees  (both  wage-workers 
and  salaried  employees)  have  not  automatically  assumed  a  so- 
cialist posture  clearly  means  that  propertylessness  is  not  the  only 
factor,  or  even  the  crucial  one,  determining  inner-consciousness 
or  political  will. 

Neither  white-collar  people  nor  wage-workers  have  been  or 
are  preoccupied  with  questions  of  property.  The  concentration 
of  property  during  the  last  century  has  been  a  slow  process  rather 
than  a  sharp  break  inside  the  life  span  of  one  generation;  even 
the  sons  and  daughters  of  farmers— among  whom  the  most  obvi- 
ous 'expropriation'  has  gone  on— have  had  their  attentions  fo- 
cused on  the  urban  lure  rather  than  on  urban  propertylessness. 
As  jobholders,  moreover,  salaried  employees  have  generally,  with 
the  rest  of  the  population,  experienced  a  secular  rise  in  standards 
of  living:  propertylessness  has  certainly  not  necessarily  coincided 
with  pauperization.  So  the  centralization  of  property,  with  conse- 
quent expropriation,  has  not  been  widely  experienced  as  'agony' 
or  reacted  to  by  proletarianization,  in  any  psychological  sense 
that  may  be  given  these  terms. 

Objectively,  we  have  seen  that  the  structural  position  of  the 
white-collar  mass  is  becoming  more  and  more  similar  to  that  of 
the  wage-workers.  Both  are,  of  course,  propertyless,  and  their 
incomes  draw  closer  and  closer  together.  All  the  factors  of  their 
status  position,  which  have  enabled  white-collar  workers  to  set 
themselves  apart  from  wage-workers,  are  now  subject  to  definite 
decline.  Increased  rationalization  is  lowering  the  skill  levels  and 
making  their  work  more  and  more  factory-like.  As  high-school 
education  becomes  more  universal  among  wage-workers,  and  the 
skills  required  for  many  white-collar  tasks  become  simpler,  it  is 
clear  that  the  white-collar  job  market  will  include  more  wage- 
worker  children. 

In  the  course  of  the  next  generation,  a  'social  class'  between 
lower  white-collar  and  wage-workers  will  probably  be  formed, 
which  means,  in  Weber's  terms,  that  between  the  two  positions 
there  will  be  a  typical  job  mobility.  This  will  not,  of  course,  in- 
volve the  professional  strata  or  the  higher  managerial  employees, 
but  it  will  include  the  bulk  of  the  workers  in  salesroom  and  office. 
These  shifts  in  the  occupational  worlds  of  the  propertyless  are 


298  WAYS  OF  POWEi? 

more  important  to  them  than  the  existing  fact  of  their  property- 
lessness. 


3.  Organizations 

The  assumption  that  political  supremacy  follows  from  func- 
tional, economic  indispensability  underlies  all  those  theories  that 
see  the  new  middle  class  or  any  of  its  sections  slated  to  be  the 
next  ruling  class.  For  it  is  assumed  that  the  class  that  is  indis- 
pensable in  fulfilling  the  major  functions  of  the  social  order  will 
be  the  next  in  the  sequence  of  ruling  classes.  Max  Weber  in  his 
essay  on  bureaucracy  has  made  short  shrift  of  this  idea:  'The 
ever-increasing  "indispensability"  of  the  officialdom,  swollen  to 
millions,  is  no  more  decisive  for  this  question  [of  power]  than  is 
the  view  of  some  representatives  of  the  proletarian  movement 
that  the  economic  indispensability  of  the  proletarians  is  decisive 
for  the  measure  of  their  social  and  political  power  position.  If 
"indispensability"  were  decisive,  then  where  slave  labor  prevailed 
and  where  freemen  usually  abhor  work  as  a  dishonor,  the  "in- 
dispensable" slaves  ought  to  have  held  the  positions  of  power, 
for  they  were  at  least  as  indispensable  as  officials  and  proletarians 
are  today.  Whether  the  power  ...  as  such  increases  cannot  be 
decided  a  priori  from  such  reasons.' 

Yet  the  assumption  that  it  can  runs  all  through  the  white-collar 
literature.  Just  as  Marx,  seeing  the  parasitical  nature  of  the  capi- 
talist's endeavor,  and  the  real  function  of  work  performed  by 
the  workers,  predicted  the  workers'  rise  to  power,  so  James  Bum- 
ham  (and  before  him  Harold  Lasswell,  and  before  him  John 
Corbin )  assumes  that  since  the  new  middle  class  is  the  carrier  of 
those  skills  upon  which  modem  society  more  and  more  depends, 
it  will  inevitably,  in  the  course  of  time,  assume  political  power. 
Technical  and  managerial  indispensability  is  thus  confused  with 
the  facts  of  power  struggle,  and  overrides  all  other  sources  of 
power.  The  deficiency  of  such  arguments  must  be  realized  posi- 
tively: we  need  to  develop  and  to  use  a  more  open  and  flexible 
model  of  the  relations  of  political  power  and  stratffication. 

Increasingly,  class  and  status  situations  have  been  removed 
from  free  market  forces  and  the  persistence  of  tradition,  and 
been  subject  to  more  formal  rules.  A  government  management 


THE  NEW  MIDDLE  CLASS,  II  299 

of  the  class  structure  has  become  a  major  means  of  alleviating 
inequalities  and  insuring  the  risks  of  those  in  lower-income 
classes.  Not  so  much  free  labor  markets  as  the  powers  of  pres- 
sure groups  now  shape  the  class  positions  and  privileges  of  vari- 
ous strata  in  the  United  States.  Hours  and  wages,  vacations,  in- 
come security  through  periods  of  sickness,  accidents,  unemploy- 
ment, and  old  age— these  are  now  subject  to  many  intentional 
pressures,  and,  along  with  tax  policies,  transfer  payments,  tariffs, 
subsidies,  price  ceilings,  wage  freezes,  et  cetera,  make  up  the 
content  of  'class  fights'  in  the  objective  meaning  of  the  phrase. 

The  'Welfare  State*  attempts  to  manage  class  chances  without 
modifying  basic  class  structure;  in  its  several  meanings  and  types, 
it  favors  economic  policies  designed  to  redistribute  life-risks  and 
life-chances  in  favor  of  those  in  the  more  exposed  class  situations, 
who  have  the  power  or  threaten  to  accumulate  the  power,  to  do 
something  about  their  case. 

Labor  union,  farm  bloc,  and  trade  association  dominate  the 
political  scene  of  the  Welfare  State  as  well  as  of  the  permanent 
war  economy;  contests  within  and  between  these  blocs  increas- 
ingly determine  the  position  of  various  groups.  The  state,  as  a 
descriptive  fact,  is  at  the  balanced  intersection  of  such  pressures, 
and  increasingly  the  privileges  and  securities  of  various  occupa- 
tional strata  depend  upon  the  bold  means  of  organized  power. 

It  is  often  by  these  means  that  the  objective  position  of  white- 
collar  and  wage-worker  becomes  similar.  The  greatest  difficulty 
with  the  Marxist  expectation  of  proletarianization  is  that  many 
changes  pointing  that  way  have  not  come  about  by  a  lowering 
of  the  white-collar  position,  but  often  more  crucially  by  a  raising 
of  the  wage-worker  position. 

The  salary,  as  contrasted  with  the  wage,  has  been  a  tradi- 
tional hall-mark  of  white-collar  employment.  Although  still  of 
prestige  value  to  many  white-collar  positions,  the  salary  must 
now  be  taken  as  a  tendency  in  most  white-collar  strata  rather 
than  a  water-tight  boundary  of  the  white-collar  worlds.  The  con- 
trast has  rested  on  difiFerences  in  the  time-span  of  payment,  and 
thus  in  security  of  tenure,  and  in  the  possibilities  to  plan  because 
of  more  secure  expectations  of  income  over  longer  periods  of 
time.  But,  increasingly,  companies  put  salaried  workers,  whose 
salary  for  some  time  in  many  places  has  been  reduced  for  ab- 


300  WAYS  OF  POWER 

sences,  on  an  hourly  basis.  And  manual  workers,  represented  by 
unions,  are  demanding  and  getting  precisely  the  type  of  priv- 
ileges once  granted  only  white-collar  people. 

All  along  the  line,  it  is  from  the  side  of  the  wage-workers  that 
the  contrast  in  privileges  has  been  most  obviously  breaking  down. 
It  was  the  mass-production  union  of  steel  workers,  not  salaried 
employees,  that  precipitated  a  national  economic  debate  over  the 
issue  of  regularized  employment;  and  white-collar  people  must 
often  now  fight  for  what  is  sometimes  assumed  to  be  their  in- 
herited privilege:  a  union  of  professionals,  The  Newspaper 
Guild,  has  to  insist  upon  dismissal  pay  as  a  clause  in  its  con- 
tracts. 

Whatever  past  difFerences  between  white-collar  and  wage- 
workers  with  respect  to  income  security,  sick  benefits,  paid  vaca- 
tions, and  working  conditions,  the  major  trend  is  now  for  these 
same  advantages  to  be  made  available  to  factory  workers.  Pen- 
sions, especially  since  World  War  II,  have  been  a  major  idea  in 
collective  bargaining,  and  it  has  been  the  wage-worker  that  has 
had  bargaining  power.  Social  insurance  to  cover  work  injuries 
and  occupational  diseases  has  gradually  been  replacing  the  com- 
mon law  of  a  century  ago,  which  held  the  employee  at  personal 
fault  for  work  injury  and  the  employer's  liability  had  to  be 
proved  in  court  by  a  damage  suit.  In  so  far  as  such  laws  exist, 
they  legally  shape  the  class  chances  of  the  manual  worker  up  to 
a  par  with  or  above  other  strata.  Both  privileges  and  income 
level  have  been  increasingly  subject  to  the  power  pressures  of 
unions  and  government,  and  there  is  every  reason  to  believe  that 
in  the  future  this  will  be  even  more  the  case. 

The  accumulation  of  power  by  any  stratum  is  dependent  on  a 
triangle  of  factors:  will  and  know-how,  objective  opportunity, 
and  organization.  The  opportunity  is  limited  by  the  group's  struc- 
tural position;  the  will  is  dependent  upon  the  group's  conscious- 
ness of  its  interests  and  ways  of  realizing  them.  And  both  struc- 
tural position  and  consciousness  interplay  with  organizations, 
which  strengthen  consciousness  and  are  made  politically  rele- 
vant by  structural  position. 


14 


White-Collar  Unionism 


Flint,  Mich.,  18  December  1945.  Only 
25  to  30  pickets  were  on  duty  this 
morning  when  the  police,  under  the 
leadership  of  Capt.  Gus  Hawkins,  drove 
parallel  lines  through  the  midst  of  the 
strikers.  About  500  white  collar  work- 
ers went  into  the  plant  through  the 
police  corridor.  There  was  no  disorder, 
the  workers  giving  way  as  they  hissed 
and  booed  the  salaried  and  clerical  per- 
sonnel of  the  plant.  Then  the  police 
withdrew  to  permit  an  orderly  resump- 
tion of  orderly  picketing.  Declaring 
that  he  would  have  10,000  men  on 
hand  in  the  morning.  Jack  F.  Holt, 
regional  director  of  the  U.A.W.,  said  : 
'We'll  see  if  they  can  get  through 
10,000  men.' 

The  best  chance  to  organize  the  white 
collar  people,  said  the  expert  organizer 
with  30  years  practical  experience,  is 
to  get  them  where  they  see  how  the 
workers  have  made  gains,  and  how 
powerful  the  workers  are  when  they 
mass  pickets  and  go  on  strike.  In  my 
long  experience  wherever  there's  strong 
wage  worker  unions  they'll  all  come 
into    the   union   in    tliose   places.   .   . 

In  a  letter  to  Mr.  Kirby,  president  of 
the  NAM,  Mr.  Emery,  counsel  for  the 
NAM,  wrote  in  1912  :  The  time  is  at 
hand  when  the  Sixteenth  Amendment 
will    provide    for    the    possession    of    a 


union  card  for  the  president  [of  the 
United  States]. 

Flint,  Mich.,  19  December  1945.  After 
standing  about  in  near  zero  weather 
for  nearly  two  hours,  500  office  work- 
ers who  walked  into  the  plant  through 
a  corridor  formed  by  police  yesterday, 
when  only  a  token  picket  line  was  on 
duty,   dispersed. 

New  York  City,  30  March  1948.  At 
8:55  this  morning  violence  broke  out 
in  Wall  Street.  Massed  pickets  from 
local  205  of  the  United  Financial  Em- 
ployees union,  supported  by  members 
of  an  AFL  seamen's  union,  knocked 
over  four  policemen  at  the  entrance 
to  the  stock  exchange  and  lay  down 
on  the  sidewalk  in  front  of  the  doors. 
One  hundred  police  officers  swarmed 
up  and,  in  several  knots  of  furious 
club-swinging,  12  people  were  hurt,  45 
seized  and  arrested.  The  outbreak  was 
over  in  30  minutes,  but  most  of  the 
day,  1200  massed  pickets  surrounded 
the  stock  exchange  building  and 
shouted  epithets  at  those  who  entered 
the    building.  .   . 

Show  me  two  white  collar  workers  on 
a  picket  line,  said  Mr.  Samuel  Gompers, 
president  of  the  AFL,  and  I'll  organize 
the  entire  working  class. 


|n  the  minds  of  the  white-collar  workers  a  struggle  has  been 
going  on  between  economic  reality  and  anti-union  feeling.  What- 
ever their  aspirations,  white-collar  people  have  been  pushed  by 
twentieth-century  facts  toward  the  wage-worker  kind  of  organ- 
ized economic  life,  and  slowly  their  illusions  have  been  moving 

301 


302 


WAYS  OF  POWER 


into  closer  harmony  with  the  terms  of  their  existence.  They  are 
becoming  aware  that  the  world  of  the  old  middle  class,  the  com- 
munity of  entrepreneurs,  has  given  way  to  a  new  society  in 
which  they,  the  white-collar  workers,  are  part  of  a  world  of  de- 
pendent employees.  Now  alongside  unions  of  steel  workers  and 
coal  miners,  there  are  unions  of  oflBce  workers  and  musicians, 
salesgirls  and  insurance  men. 

What  is  the  extent  of  white-collar  unionism?  What  causes 
white-collar  workers  to  accept  or  reject  unionism,  and  what  is  its 
meaning  to  them?  What  bearing  do  white-collar  unions  have  on 
the  shape  of  American  labor  unions  as  a  whole?  On  the  possibili- 
ties of  a  democratic  political  economy  in  the  United  States? 


White 

Wage- 

Collar 

Worker 

Total 

1900 

2.5% 

8.2% 

6.5% 

1920 

8.1% 

21.5% 

17.9% 

1935 

5.0% 

12.1% 

9.6% 

1948 

16.2% 

44.1% 

34.5% 

1.  The  Extent  Organized 

By  the  opening  of  the  twentieth  century,  8.2  per  cent  of  the 
wage-workers  and  2.5  per  cent  of  the  white-collar  employees 
were  in  unions.  Here  are  the  proportions  organized  for  selected 
years  since  then: 

After  1915,  with  profitable 
business,  growing  labor  scar- 
city, and  an  easier  Federal 
Government  attitude,  the  pro- 
portions of  wage-workers  and 
white-collar  people  in  unions 
nearly  doubled;  by  1920  some 
8.1  per  cent  of  the  white-collar  and  21.5  per  cent  of  the  wage- 
workers  were  in  unions,  a  total  of  nearly  five  million  people.  Con- 
trary to  the  general  rule,  the  prosperity  of  the  'twenties  did  not 
bring  a  union  boom,  for  technical  advances  were  so  great  they 
created  labor  surpluses  even  in  boom  time;  industries  benefiting 
most  from  the  boom  were  not  unionized,  while  the  boom  in 
unionized  industries  was  not  so  great;  and  the  prevailing  craft- 
type  unions  were  not  in  harmony  with  the  mass-production  tech- 
niques which  were  rapidly  coming  to  the  fore. 

With  the  slump,  the  unions  lost  heavily:  by  1935  only  5.0  per 
cent  of  the  white-collar  and  12.1  per  cent  of  the  wage- workers 
were  in  unions:  a  total  of  3.4  millions.  But  that  year  the  tide 
turned.  Legislation  establishing  the  right  to  unionize;  a  favor- 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  303 

able  sequence  of  court  decisions;  an  atmosphere  of  official  friend- 
liness and  of  worker  receptivity;  the  wider  advent  of  industrial 
unionism;  and  finally,  implementing  all  these,  the  war  boom  with 
its  tight  labor  market— these  developments  in  labor's  decade 
brought  the  1948  proportion  of  organized  wage-workers  to  44.1 
per  cent  and  of  white-collar  workers  to  16.2  per  cent.  Unions  for 
wage-workers  grew  more,  if  for  no  other  reason  than  that  the 
great  organizing  drives  were  centered  in  them.  In  comparing  the 
proportion  of  wage-workers  with  white-collar  employees  in 
unions  we  must  also  keep  in  mind  that  white-collar  unionism  has 
faced  an  uphill  fight:  in  the  first  48  years  of  this  century  the 
number  of  potential  white-collar  unionists  increased  406  per  cent 
(from  3.7  to  14.7  million),  while  potential  wage- worker  unionists 
increased  only  320  per  cent  (from  9.1  to  29  million). 

White-collar  unionism  is  now  beyond  the  position  of  wage- 
workers'  in  the  middle  'thirties,  when  12.1  per  cent  of  the  wage- 
workers  were  organized.  Today,  with  16.2  per  cent  of  the  white- 
collar  workers  already  in  unions,  and  the  'white-collar  mass  in- 
dustries' practically  untouched,  American  labor  unions  are  in  a 
much  better  position  to  undertake  white-collar  unionization.  The 
law  is  favorable  and  perhaps  soon  will  be  more  so;  the  unions 
have  money  to  put  into  it;  they  have  more  skilled  and  experi- 
enced organizers;  there  is  general  prosperity,  yet  some  still  fear 
slump;  the  unions  are  working  in  a  friendly  political  atmos- 
phere, and  moreover  one  created,  as  they  see  it,  to  a  great  extent 
by  their  power— power  which,  over  the  last  decade  and  a  half, 
has  given  the  unions  much  greater  prestige.  With  all  these  as- 
sets, there  is  no  doubt  that,  given  the  will  and  the  intelligence, 
organizing  drives  among  unorganized  white-collar  workers  could 
be  successfully  carried  through.  Yet  as  of  now,  84  per  cent  of 
white-collar  workers  are  still  not  in  unions. 

The  historical  centers  of  white-collar  unionism  have  been  rail- 
roading, government,  and  entertainment.  Before  World  War  I, 
these  three  fields  together  accounted  for  between  64  and  77  per 
cent,  and  during  the  'twenties  and  early  'thirties,  for  over  85 
per  cent,  of  all  unionized  white-collar  people.  Only  with  the  or- 
ganizing drives  of  the  latter  'thirties  did  thev  lose  their  relative 


304  WAYS  OF  POWER 

ascendency,  although  even  today  they  contain  58  per  cent  of  all 
white-collar  unionists. 

One  might  suppose  that  white-collar  unions  would  be  strong  in 
areas  where  wage-worker  unions  flourish,  but  this  is  the  case 
only  in  certain  industries,  such  as  railroads.  During  the  first  third 
of  the  century,  labor  unions  meant  largely  unions  in  coal  mining, 
railroading,  and  building  trades.  During  the  First  World  War, 
clothing,  shipbuilding,  and  the  metal  trades  entered  the  union 
world.  None  of  these  industries,  except  railroading,  contains  con- 
centrations of  white-collar  workers.  So  the  industries  in  which 
unionism  has  centered  preclude  a  clear  historical  test  of  the  idea 
that  white-collar  unions  flourish  when  they  supplement  wage- 
worker  unions. 

Today,  the  industries  in  which  substantial  numbers  of  white- 
collar  employees  are  organized  include  transportation,  communi- 
cation, entertainment,  and  one  branch  of  the  Federal  Govern- 
ment, the  Postal  Service.  In  all  other  areas,  including  manufac- 
turing and  retafl  trade,  the  proportion  organized  is  never  more 
than  10  per  cent,  seldom  more  than  4  or  5. 

2.  Acceptance  and  Rejection 

The  acceptance  or  rejection  of  unions  depends  upon  employees' 
awareness  of  their  objective  problems  and  recognition  of  unions 
as  means  for  meeting  them.  For  people  to  accept  unions  obvi- 
ously requires  that  unions  be  available  to  them,  and  moreover, 
that  they  view  unions  as  instruments  for  achieving  desired  aims 
rather  than  in  terms  of  the  illusions  about  unions  so  often  current 
in  white-collar  circles. 

Objective  circumstances  of  the  work  situation  influence  the 
white-collar  employees'  psychology  when  they  are  confronted 
with  the  idea  of  joining  a  union.  By  and  large,  these  are  not  dif- 
ferent from  those  affecting  the  organizability  of  wage-workers, 
and  include:  strategic  position  in  the  technological  or  marketing 
processes  of  an  industry,  which  conditions  bargaining  power;  un- 
fair treatment  by  employers,  which  creates  a  high  state  of  griev- 
ance; a  helpful  legal  framework,  which  protects  the  right  to  or- 
ganize; a  profitable  business  but  one  in  which  labor  costs  form 
a  small  proportion  of  the  cost  of  production,  which  means  that 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  305 

higher  wages  will  not  severely  affect  total  costs;  relative  per- 
manency of  employment  and  of  labor  force,  so  that  organization 
may  be  stable. 

The  relation  to  the  'boss'  is  an  often  crucial  and  usually  com- 
plicated matter.  On  the  one  hand,  the  technological  and  educa- 
tional similarity  of  white-collar  work  to  the  work  of  the  boss;  the 
physical  nearness  to  him;  the  prestige  borrowed  from  him;  the 
rejection  of  wage-worker  types  of  organization  for  prestige  rea- 
sons; the  greater  privileges  and  securities;  the  hope  of  ascent— all 
these,  when  they  exist,  predispose  the  white-collar  employee  to 
identify  with  the  boss.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  fear  and  even 
hatred  of  the  boss.  In  fact,  loyalty  to  management,  advanced  by 
white-collar  employees,  is  often,  unknown  even  to  them,  an  inse- 
cure cover-up  for  fear  of  reprisal.  In  one  office,  for  example,  dur- 
ing a  union  drive,  ten  old  employees  held  out  firmly:  'We're  per- 
fectly happy  in  our  jobs.  We  like  to  work  here.  We  make  enough 
to  live  on,  maybe  as  much  as  we're  worth.  And  besides,  our  boss, 
who  is  a  real  gentleman,  is  doing  all  he  can  afford  to  do  for  us.' 
The  company's  attitude  toward  the  union  was  outspokenly  bitter; 
but  soon,  because  of  pressure  from  the  already  organized  sales 
force,  it  shifted  to  acquiescence.  Then,  almost  overnight,  the  at- 
titude of  the  ten  old-line  employees  also  shifted;  they  began  to 
spill  grievances,  their  one  great  fear  now  being  that  they  might 
not  be  allowed  to  join  the  union.  They  expressed  their  intimately 
felt  disapproval  of  the  boss's  ways,  and  one  of  them  even  re- 
ported daydreams  of  heavy  ledgers  dropping  from  tall  filing  cases 
on  the  boss's  head. 

Although  acceptance  of  unions  does  involve  some  sense  of  the 
separateness  of  one's  economic  interest  from  that  of  the  boss  and 
the  company,  the  attitude  to  management  is  not  an  explicit,  sim- 
ple key  to  the  psychology  of  white-collar  unionism.  The  white- 
collar  organizer  finds  other  psychological  circumstances  lying 
deeper  and  variously  reflected  by  the  white-collar  man  or  woman 
he  approaches.  Three  general  indices  to  these  circumstances, 
each  involving  a  whole  complex  of  accompanying  feelings  and 
opinions,  are  involved  in  'white-collar'  appraisals  of  unions: 

I,  One  major  reason  white-collar  employees  often  reject  unions 
is  that  unions  have  not  been  available  to  them.  An  immensely 


306  WAYS  OF  POWER 

greater  effort  over  a  longer  period  of  time  has  been  given  to 
wage-worker  unionism.  For  most  white-collar  employees  to  join 
or  not  to  join  a  union  has  never  been  a  live  question,  for  no  union 
has  been  available,  or,  if  it  has,  was  not  energetically  urging  affili- 
ation. For  these  employees,  the  question  has  been  to  organize  or 
not  to  organize  a  union,  which  is  a  very  different  proposition  from 
joining  or  not  joining  an  available  union. 

Moreover,  unless  they  are  themselves  unionized,  white-collar 
workers  usually  have  relatively  little  personal  contact  with  union 
personnel  or  with  friends  or  relatives  who  are  union  members. 
Being  personally  in  contact  with  union  leaders  and  union  mem- 
bers, however,  is  a  decisive  factor  in  one's  union  attitude.  In  the 
absence  of  such  contact  and  given  the  general  hostile  atmosphere 
that  prevails  in  many  white-collar  circles,  an  anti-union  attitude 
often  results.  Personal  exposure  to  unions  not  only  reveals  their 
benefits,  but  sometimes  creates  a  social  situation  in  which  those 
who  don't  belong  feel  socially  ostracized.  More  generally,  con- 
tacts with  union  people  tend  to  discount  anti-unionism;  in  fact, 
they  seem  to  be  the  most  single  important  antidote. 

n.  The  political  party  affiliations  of  white-collar  employees  and 
their  families  buttress  their  union  feelings.  Although  some  white- 
collar  groups  have  tended  to  shift  from  their  parents'  Democratic 
or  Republican  tradition  to  an  independent  position,  generally 
stated  as  voting  for  'the  best  man,'  but  frequently  coming  to 
mean  Republican,  most  remain  in  the  same  party  as  their  parents. 
People  generally  come  into  contact  with  party  rhetoric  before 
they  do  union  rhetoric,  and  this  affects  their  receptivity  to  union 
proposals.  Part>'  identifications  are  closely  associated  with  union 
attitude:  third-party  and  Democratic  people  tend  to  be  more 
pro-union  than  Independents  or  Republicans.  The  New  Deal,  and 
especially  the  personality  of  President  Roosevelt,  did  more  for 
unions  than  create  an  encouraging  legal  framework;  it  raised  the 
prestige  value  of  unions,  and  for  many  middle-class  groups,  it 
did  much  to  neutralize  the  prestige  depreciation  which  joining 
had  entailed.  It  made  the  union  a  more  respectable  feature  of 
American  life,  and  since  the  New  Deal,  the  union's  public  suc- 
cess and  increased  power  have  further  supported  its  increased 
respectability. 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  307 

III.  Not  job  dissatisfaction  in  general,  but  a  specific  kind  of  job 
dissatisfaction— the  feeling  that  as  an  individual  he  cannot  get 
ahead  in  his  work— is  the  job  factor  that  predisposes  the  white- 
collar  employee  to  go  pro-union.  This  opinion  is  more  important 
in  the  conscious  psychology  of  white-collar  unionism  than  the 
good  or  bad  will  of  the  company,  the  degree  of  job  routinization, 
et  cetera.  There  is  a  close  association  between  the  feeling  that 
one  cannot  get  ahead,  regardless  of  the  reason,  and  a  pro-union 
attitude:  'I  don't  think  there  are  any  chances  .  .  .  only  a  few 
can  get  promotion  ...  I  would  join  a  union  .  ,  .  we  are  ex- 
ploited. .  .'  But  others  say:  T  think  there's  a  good  chance  to  get 
ahead.  It's  entirely  up  to  you.  An  assistant  to  the  boss  is  going  to 
leave.  I've  got  the  opportunity  to  step  in  there.  .  .  Maybe  with 
more  training  I  can  be  the  boss.  .  .  If  I  don't  make  good  it's  my 
own  fault.  .  .  I  really  don't  see  what  you  gain  from  belong- 
ing. .  .' 

Personal  exposure  to  unions,  political  party  affiliation,  and  feel- 
ings about  individual  chances  to  climb— these  three  factors  pre- 
dispose white-collar  people  to  accept  unions.*  And  each  of  these 
predisposing  factors  is  generally  moving  in  the  direction  of  pro- 
unionism:  despite  some  counter-tendencies  during  the  war,  indi- 
vidual ascent  chances  and  hopes  will  probably  continue  to  de- 
cline for  white-collar  people.  The  1948  Democratic  victory  fur- 
ther increased  the  respectability  of  the  'liberal'  political  column 
and  hence  the  numbers  in  it.  And  if,  as  labor  grows,  white-collar 
drives  get  underway,  more  and  more  white-collar  people  will  be 
exposed,  directly  or  indirectly,  to  unionism. 

The  white-collar  worker  may  accept  or  reject  unions  (1)  in 
terms  of  their  instrumental  value,  seeing  them  as  ways  to  realize 

*  Among  a  small  group  (128)  of  white-collar  people  intensively 
studied,  85  per  cent  of  those  with  strong  predisposition  (all  three 
factors  positive),  53  per  cent  of  the  intermediate  (1  or  2  factors), 
and  none  of  the  weakly  predisposed  felt  favorable  to  unions.  At  the 
other  end  of  the  scale,  none  of  the  strongly  predisposed,  16  per  cent 
of  the  intermediate,  and  75  per  cent  of  the  weakly  predisposed  were 
anti-union. 

People  who  have  experienced  only  one  or  two,  but  not  all,  of  these 
three  factors  turn  out  to  be  on-the-fence  about  unionization,  for  they 
have  been  under  contradictory  influences:  their  hope  of  ascent  is  dim 
but  they  have  not  been  personally  exposed  to  unions;  or  their  politics 
are  against  unions  but  they  have  been  favorably  exposed  to  unions; 
or,  if  they  are  liberals,  perhaps  they  see  a  good  chance  of  ascent. 


308  WAYS  OF  POWER 

economic  and  job  benefits;  or  in  terms  of  principle,  seeing  them 
as  good  or  bad  in  themselves  with  no  concern  over  their  immedi- 
ate effects  on  his  hfe;  (2)  in  terms  of  himself  and  his  own  job 
situation,  or  in  terms  of  'other  people'  and  their  job  situations. 

In  the  mass  media  of  communication,  unions  are  more  likely 
to  be  presented  ideologically  than  as  helpful  instrumentalities. 
'Union  news'  is  seldom  presented  'up  close,'  in  such  a  way  that 
members  of  the  public  could  easily  identify  with  unions  as  prac- 
tical means  to  their  own  practical  ends.  So  some  ideological 
counter-force  is  often  needed  if  unions  are  to  be  accepted  on 
principle,  or,  as  is  more  usual,  if  principled  rejection  is  to  be 
by-passed  and  the  instrumental  benefits  of  unions  understood. 
That  ideological  counter-force  is  often  summed  up  in  political- 
party  identification.  Unless  the  non-unionized  white-collar  worker 
has  been  influenced  by  liberal  political-party  rhetoric,  there  is 
little  chance  that  he  will  accept  unions  for  himself  on  principle. 

Given  the  generally  hostile  atmosphere,  still  carried  by  the 
mass  media,  there  is  undoubtedly  more  principled  rejection  than 
principled  acceptance  of  the  unions.  Pro-union  ideology  serves 
primarily  to  clear  away  principled  objections  in  order  that  an  in- 
strumental view  may  come  to  the  fore.  One  reason  personal  con- 
tact with  union  members  weighs  so  heavily  in  pro-unionism  is 
that  such  contact  frequently  results  in  a  more  instrumental  type 
of  judgment.  Then  various  interest  factors,  notably  feelings 
about  ascent  chances,  can  become  decisive. 

Unions  are  usually  accepted  as  something  to  be  used,  rather 
than  as  something  in  which  to  believe.  They  are  understood  as 
having  to  do  strictly  with  the  job  and  are  valued  for  their  help 
on  the  job.  They  rest  upon,  and  perhaps  carry  further,  the  alien- 
ated split  of  'job'  from  'life.'  Acceptance  of  them  does  not  seem 
to  lead  to  new  identifications  in  other  areas  of  living. 

3.   Individual  Involvement 

One  might  suppose  that  pro-unionism  would  involve  greater 
feelings  of  solidarity  among  co-workers,  and  greater  antagonism 
toward  the  higher-ups  or  the  company.  But  this  is  not  necessarily 
the  case:  those  white-collar  workers  who  are  in  unions  or  who 
are  pro-union  in  outlook  do  not  always  display  more  co-worker 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  309 

solidarity  than  those  not  in  unions  or  who  are  anti-union  in  feel- 
ing. Equal  proportions  on  either  side  are  competitively  oriented 
toward  co-workers,  see  co-workers  off  the  job,  are  friendly  with 
them,  have  a  feeling  of  belonging  to  the  work-group  rather  than 
just  happening  to  be  there,  and  feel  estranged  from  the  company 
or  the  higher-ups. 

In  the  union  or  out  of  it,  for  it,  against  it,  or  on  the  fence,  the 
white-collar  employee  usually  remains  psychologically  the  little 
individual  scrambling  to  get  to  the  top,  instead  of  a  dependent 
employee  experiencing  unions  and  accepting  union  affiliation  as 
collective  means  of  collective  ascent.  This  lack  of  effect  of  unions 
is  of  course  linked  with  the  reasons  white-collar  people  join 
them:  to  most  members,  the  union  is  an  impersonal  economic 
instrument  rather  than  a  springboard  to  new  personal,  social,  or 
political  ways  of  life. 

The  main  connection  between  union  and  individual  member  is 
the  fatter  pay  check,  a  fact  which  is  in  line  with  the  general 
American  accent  on  individual  pecuniary  success,  as  well  as  the 
huckstering  animus  of  many  union  organizers.  Unions,  'instru- 
mentally'  accepted,  are  alternatives  to  the  traditional  individu- 
alistic means  of  obtaining  the  traditional  goals  of  success.  They 
are  collective  instruments  for  pursuing  individual  goals;  belong- 
ing to  them  does  not  modify  the  goals,  although  it  may  make  the 
member  feel  more  urgently  about  these  goals.  Union  organizers 
are  salesmen  of  the  idea,  as  one  organizing  pamphlet  for  white- 
collar  employees  puts  it,  that  'You  can  get  it,  too!'  and  'Union 
organization  is  the  modern  way  to  go  places.'  The  prevailing 
strategy  is  to  by-pass  the  status,  the  ideology,  and  the  politics 
and  to  stress  economic  realities  and  benefits.  The  only  status  ap- 
peal, a  kind  of  hard-boiled  'keeping  up'  tactic,  is  still  focused  on 
the  pay  lag  between  white-collar  and  wage-worker:  'If  you  are 
not  organized,  the  world  is  passing  you  by!' 

Yet,  despite  the  dominant  ways  unions  are  sold  and  accepted, 
there  are  indications  that  they  often  mean  more  to  white-collar 
people:  'I  feel  I  have  somebody  at  the  back  of  me.'  'I  have  a  feel- 
ing that  we  are  all  together  and  strong— you  are  not  a  ball  at 
the  feet  of  the  company.'  'The  union,  it's  my  protection.'  'You 
feel  you  are  not  being  pushed  around.'  These  apparently  simple 
and  straightforward  feelings  in  reality  rest  upon  complex  factors 


310  WAYS  OF  POWER 

of  prestige  claims  and  economic  security  and  upon  certain  inter- 
vals of  exciting  powerfulness  which  the  union  has  brought  into 
the  routine  and  often  dreary  white-collar  life.  In  such  intervals, 
the  union  appears  as  a  social  force  on  the  job  with  which  em- 
ployees can  identify  positively;  and  with  this,  the  company  and 
its  higher-ups  appear  as  counter-forces  about  which  the  em- 
ployee feels  ambiguous  or  negative. 

The  fact  that  union  affairs  can  be  exciting  during  times  of 
struggle  must  not  be  underestimated  in  the  union's  appeal  to  the 
white-collar  people.  Generally  it  is  only  then  that  the  union, 
rather  than  an  unattended  instrument,  becomes  a  social  norm— 
'When  you  work  with  people  and  they  belong,  you  feel  you 
should  belong  too'— as  well  as  a  welcome  variation  from  normal 
work  routines:  'During  the  strike  we  had  a  couple  of  months  ago 
we  talked  a  lot  .  .  .  we  were  out  two  days  and  got  an  increase 
of  $2.00  .  .  .  we  had  a  meeting  about  a  week  before  the  strike. 
That  was  probably  the  most  exciting  thing  that  happened  at 
work.  It  made  it  sort  of  exciting  to  go  to  work.  Everybody  was 
talking  about  it.  It  was  something  different  from  every  other  day. 
I  felt  I  had  a  part  in  it.  .  ,' 

Resentment,  slowly  produced  by  the  routine  of  dull  work,  finds 
an  outlet  in  strong  anti-company  and  strong  pro-union  loyalties, 
but  to  hold  these  loyalties,  unions,  like  any  other  institution,  must 
operate  dramatically  as  well  as  in  the  obvious  interests  of  the 
members.  Perhaps  nothing  is  so  exciting  to  the  employee,  apart 
from  a  strike,  as  the  union's  'investigating  the  company.'  'They 
said  that  that  was  the  reason— they  couldn't  afford  it.  But  they 
have  paid  off  a  million-dollar  loan  and  still  have  a  miUion  in  the 
bank.  They  have  it.  The  union  had  them  investigated.  You  should 
have  seen  the  head's  face  when  he  found  out.' 

In  all  this,  white-collar  unionism  does  not  differ  markedly  from 
those  wage-worker  unions  we  have  had  occasion  to  study.  The 
UAW  member  in  Detroit,  for  example,  does  not  differ  in  his 
union  attitude  very  markedly  from  members  of  New  York  City 
white-collar  unions.  Both  are  after,  in  the  first  instance,  better 
conditions  of  work,  especially  more  pay  and  more  secure  pay, 
and  both  consciously  get  'protection'  out  of  unions.  More  sys- 
tematically, the  union  performs  four  functions  in  the  employee's 
life: 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  311 

I.  Economically,  unions  mean  economic  advances  and  protec- 
tion against  arbitrary  wage  action.  The  fruits  of  increased  pro- 
ductivity, brought  about  by  the  rationalization  of  white-collar 
work,  are  not  automatically  passed  on  to  the  employee:  only  by 
organizations  that  force  bargaining  and  concessions  can  white- 
collar  workers  make  economic  gains.  They  cannot  continue  in- 
definitely to  benefit  from  wage-workers'  organizations— as  they 
have  undoubtedly  been  doing  in  many  industries— and  not  shoul- 
der part  of  the  risk  and  the  work  involved. 

Differences  in  what  various  unions  fight  for  reflect  diflFerences 
in  employer  policy  more  than  differences  in  union  philosophy. 
The  trend  in  white-collar  unions  seems  to  be  to  line  up  salaries 
and  conditions  with  those  of  other  organized  white-collar  workers 
rather  than  with  the  pattern  prevailing  in  the  same  industry 
among  production  workers.  Yet  the  plain  economic  struggle  of 
white-collar  workers  will  continue,  whether  or  not  they  have 
unions,  to  be  part  of  the  fight  of  labor  as  a  whole,  of  carpenters 
and  auto  workers  and  coal  diggers.  It  will  not  have  any  auton- 
omy, as  the  economic  struggle  of  a  separated  group,  because  of 
any  economically  peculiar  position  white-collar  people  may  think 
they  occupy.  Although,  as  more  white-collar  people  are  union- 
ized, their  share  in  deciding  the  terms  of  the  struggle  may  be- 
come greater,  their  economic  struggle  is  not  diflFerent  from  that 
of  the  wage-workers. 

The  privileges  that  white-collar  employees  have  traditionally 
enjoyed  are  being  formalized  in  the  union  contracts  they  secure; 
and,  as  National  Industrial  Conference  Board  studies  have 
shown,  it  is  in  this  area  of  'fringe  benefits'  that  their  contracts 
differ  most  from  wage-workers'.  White-collar  contracts  are  usu- 
ally much  more  likely  than  those  of  production  workers'  to  con- 
tain welfare  clauses:  personal  leaves,  paid  sick  leaves,  sever- 
ance pay,  holiday  and  vacation  rules.  Yet  the  formalization  of 
such  privileges,  in  white-collar  contracts,  comes  at  a  time  when 
wage-worker  unions  are  also  seriously  beginning  to  fight  for 
them,  as  well  as  for  the  more  solid  privileges  of  medical  and 
pension  plans. 

n.  If  the  unions  raise  the  level  and  security  of  the  employees' 
income,  at  the  same  time  they  may  lower  the  level  and  security 


312  WAYS  OF  POWER 

of  prestige.  For  in  so  far  as  white-collar  claims  for  prestige  rest 
upon  differences  between  themselves  and  wage-workers,  and  in 
so  far  as  the  organizations  they  join  are  pubhcly  associated 
with  worker  organizations,  one  of  the  bases  of  white-collar  pres- 
tige is  done  away  with.  White-collar  people  are  often  quite  aware 
of  this:  'It  is  not  possible  that  a  union  would  start  in  my  busi- 
ness, but  if  it  did  I  do  not  think  I  would  join  because  .  .  .  people 
think  less  of  you.  Management  unconsciously  thinks  that  people 
who  belong  to  a  union  have  not  enough  sense  to  talk  for  them- 
selves.' 

The  status  psychology  of  white-collar  employees  is  part  of  a 
'principled'  rejection  of  unionism,  although  it  often  has  instru- 
mental content  as  well:  the  hope  of  being  judged  by  manage- 
ment as  different  from  wage-workers,  and  so  of  climbing  by  tra- 
ditional individual  means.  Apart  from  this,  the  prestige  claims  are 
purely  invidious  and  principled;  and  usually  are  overcome  only 
when  the  employee,  by  personal  contact,  comes  to  see  the  union 
as  an  instrument,  is  exposed  to  more  liberal  political  rhetoric, 
and,  above  all,  has  lost  his  hope  of  ascent  by  individual  rneans. 

However  widespread  the  prestige  resistances  to  unions  may 
now  be,  solid,  long-run  factors  are  acting  to  reduce  them,  for 
these  are  the  same  factors  we  saw  affecting  general  white-collar 
prestige:  lack  of  differences  between  wage- worker  and  white- 
collar  income;  white-collar  unemployment,  as  during  the  'thirties; 
the  breakdown  of  the  white-collar  monopoly  on  high-school  edu- 
cation; the  inevitable  reduction  of  the  claims  of  white-collar 
people  for  prestige  based  on  their  not  being  'foreign-born,  like 
workers';  the  concentration  of  white-collar  workers  into  big  work 
places  and  their  down-grading  and  routinization;  the  mere  in- 
crease in  the  total  numbers  of  white-collar  people— all  these  fac- 
tors and  trends  are  tearing  away  the  foundations  of  the  white- 
collar  rejection  of  unions  on  the  basis  of  prestige. 

Today  white-collar  workers  and  their  organizations  use  many 
dodges  to  avoid  identification  with  wage-workers  and  yet  secure 
the  benefits  of  unionism.  They  call  their  unions  'guilds'  or  'associ- 
ations'; they  have  a  permanent  no-strike  policy,  et  cetera.  In  the 
end  all  this  is  nonsense  so  far  as  the  central  economic  purpose  of 
unions  is  concerned;  yet,  although  their  sacrifice  of  prestige  is 
the  sacrifice  of  a  fading  value,  this  value  is  still  real  to  white- 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  315 

collar  employees,  often  more  so  than  their  low  incomes.  In  his 
appeal  the  union  organizer  has  to  balance  the  prestige  loss 
against  the  economic  gains:  in  the  short  run,  the  loss  is  greatly 
softened  by  the  strictly  instrumental  way  unionism  is  accepted; 
in  the  long  run,  objective  forces  will  destroy  the  bases  of  such 
claims  for  higher  prestige. 

m.  Unionism  objectively  means  a  declaration  of  collective  in- 
dependence, and,  correspondingly,  a  tacit  acceptance  of  indi- 
vidual dependence.  We  have  seen  how  closely  the  feeling  that 
one  has  no  individual  chance  to  rise  is  related  to  a  pro-union  atti- 
tude. White-collar  unions,  like  those  of  wage-workers',  are  in  part 
a  consequence  of  a  rationalization  of  the  work  process.  For  only 
an  organization  can  talk  back  and  exert  power  over  the  condi- 
tions of  such  work  and  over  the  work-life  itself.  In  their  quest  for 
occupational  justice— equal  conditions  and  equal  pay  for  equal 
grades  of  work— the  unions  further  rationalization  of  work,  while 
at  the  same  time  shaping  it  more  to  the  interests  of  the  work 
group  as  a  whole.  Regardless  of  the  union's  ideology,  the  task  of 
the  job-description  committee,  soon  at  work  in  many  union 
drives,  is  to  reorganize  the  personnel  hierarchy  of  the  company, 
incidentally  wiping  out  many  prestige  distinctions  without  eco- 
nomic content  cultivated  by  management  or  allowed  to  encrust 
on  the  hierarchy  by  usage.  Sometimes  this  creates  active  resent- 
ment among  employees:  I'm  not  sure  I'd  want  to  join.  .  .  My 
friend  says  they  brow-beat  them  in  her  office.  They  walk  up  and 
down  the  office  and  watch  what  people  are  doing,  and  if  a  file 
girl  types  even  a  label,  they  threaten  to  have  her  fired.' 

The  employees'  modern  choice  is  not  between  individual  inde- 
pendence and  individual  dependence  on  the  employer.  Unions 
are  devices  by  which  collections  of  people  get  done  what  the  em- 
ployer is  in  a  position  to  do  for  himself,  and  what  in  a  simpler 
age  of  more  kindly  exploitation  employees  were  in  a  position  to 
do  for  themselves  individually.  As  the  union  lessens  the  employ- 
ees' dependence  upon  the  employer,  it  substitutes  dependence 
upon  the  union,  an  organization  expected  to  act  more  in  accord- 
ance with  their  interests.  In  many  industries,  the  union  is  an  ad- 
ditional bureaucracy,  seeking  to  influence  the  way  employees  are 
geared  into  the  larger  bureaucracy  of  the  business.  Within  the 


314  WAYS  OF  POWER 

company,  the  unionized  white-collar  worker  associates  himself 
with  a  new  sort  of  personnel  organization,  one  having  his  inter- 
ests in  mind;  to  the  extent  that  his  union  is  internally  democratic, 
he  gains  a  collective  voice  with  which  he  shouts  to  the  top  of  the 
company  about  his  specific  job  and  his  individual  grievances.  In- 
side the  oflBce  and  salesroom  and  up  in  the  front  of  the  plant, 
unions  increase  the  collective  power  of  the  white-collar  employee 
over  the  conditions  and  the  security  of  his  work-life. 

rv.  The  power  of  the  union,  white-collar  or  otherwise,  is  also 
exerted  in  the  political  economy,  where,  to  the  extent  that  they 
are  members  of  effective  national  unions,  the  power  of  the  white- 
collar  employees  increases.  For,  as  union  members,  they  are  rep- 
resented by  organized  pressure  groups  that  are  increasingly  ef- 
fective in  the  politics  of  economic  bargaining. 


4.  The  Shape  of  Unionism 

Since  at  least  the  'thirties  the  organization  of  white-collar  work- 
ers has  been  a  standard  item  on  the  liberal-labor  agenda,  but  the 
political  meaning  of  such  organization  is  not  often  seriously  dis- 
cussed. Suppose  that  8  or  9  million  of  the  12.3  million  unorgan- 
ized white-collar  people  were  in  the  unions— what  would  it  mean 
for  the  political  character  and  direction  of  U.S.  labor? 

To  answer  this  question  we  must  consider:  i,  whether  white- 
collar  unionism  has  or  is  likely  to  develop  a  mentality  and  direc- 
tion of  its  own;  n,  whether  white-collar  unions  tend  to  display 
more  or  less  militancy  than  wage-worker  unions;  and  iii,  whether 
or  not,  and  in  what  sense,  an  enlargement  of  white-collar  unions 
might  constitute  'labor's  link  to  the  middle  class.' 

I.  Throughout  the  present  century,  the  AFL  has  remained 
dominant  in  the  white-collar  field.  In  1900,  white-collar  unionists 
were  evenly  divided  between  AFL  and  independent  unions;  since 
then  the  AFL  proportion  has  grown  and  by  1935  contained  two- 
thirds  of  all  unionized  white-collar  workers.  The  rise  of  the  CIO 
has  only  slightly  weakened  AFL  dominance  in  the  white-collar 
field;  for  the  big  CIO  organizing  drives  were  in  mass  industrial 
rather  than  white-collar  areas.  As  of  1948,  62  per  cent  of  all  un- 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  315 

ionized  white-collar  employees  were  in  the  AFL,  22  per  cent 
in  independent  unions,  and  16  per  cent  in  the  CIO.  If  we  turn 
these  figures  around,  and  compute  the  white-collar  proportions 
within  each  union  bloc,  21  per  cent  of  all  independent  unionists 
were  white-collar  workers,  19  per  cent  of  all  AFL  members,  and 
only  8  per  cent  of  all  CIO  union  members. 

If  more  white-collar  workers  are  organized,  they  will  most 
likely,  under  present  conditions,  be  organized  by  existing  labor 
organizations.  In  the  fall  of  1948,  CIO  heads  did  announce  a 
white-collar  drive,  and  since  then  various  moves  have  been  made 
to  get  it  under  way.  In  so  far  as  they  were  serious  about  it,  they 
were  probably  impelled,  in  addition  to  the  standard  motive  of 
protecting  these  workers'  interests,  by  certain  political  considera- 
tions. Within  the  CIO,  'the  white-collar  drive'  was  a  drive  against 
certain  highly  vocal  Communist  elements,  which  top  CIO  men 
wished  to  be  rid  of.  The  way  to  upset  as  well  as  to  gain  union 
power  is  to  organize  and  counter-organize.  They  also  desired,  in 
the  current  political  phase,  to  overtake  and  surpass  AFL  unions 
in  the  numbers  of  enrolled  members.  The  white-collar  fields  are 
new  frontiers,  which  involve  a  minimum  of  jurisdictional  tangle. 

Many  CIO  leaders  are  young,  ambitious  men  who  have  already 
organized  their  initially  chosen  fields;  a  white-collar  drive  ofi^ers 
an  outlet  for  their  energies;  organizing  drives  are  power  accumu- 
lators for  leaders  no  less  than  for  workers.  Also  some  older  lead- 
ers, recently  risen  to  top  power  in  their  middle  age,  might  wish  to 
make  their  own  marks;  in  trade-union  circles,  this  means  to  or- 
ganize. Labor  leaders,  in  and  out  of  the  CIO,  probably  think  that 
white-collar  organizing  will  increase  their  political  pull  in  the 
'middle-class'  area,  and  thus  improve  the  unions'  public  relations. 
In  so  far  as  they  are  contenders  for  power  and  influence  in  one 
or  the  other  of  the  standard  political  parties,  they  look  upon  in- 
clusion of  white-collar  people  in  their  unions  as  a  winning  card 
in  contests  within  and  between  party  and  state. 

The  chance  for  a  freewheeling  bloc  of  white-collar  unions  sep- 
arate from  the  existing  blocs  seems  very  slight,  in  part  because 
of  the  existing  union  set-up,  and  in  part  because  white-collar 
employees,  and  potential  leaders  among  them,  have  no  firm  ideo- 
logical or  practical  reasons  to  wish  to  play  an  independent  part. 
In  the  existing  union  world,  wage-worker  unions  have  the  prior- 


316  WAYS  OF  POWER 

ity  of  organization;  their  base  is  so  large  and  firm  that  in  our  time 
white-collar  people,  even  if  completely  organized,  would  not  be 
able  to  achieve  dominance.  Organization  requires  money;  in  the 
modern  accounting  system  of  unionism,  so  much  a  head  is  re- 
quired; in  a  world  of  big  business,  big  government,  and  big  un- 
ions, small  unions  without  funds  fall  behind  or  are  swallowed  by 
larger  ones. 

White-collar  organization  in  the  'fifties  is  less  likely  to  be  spon- 
taneous or  to  come  from  the  bottom  up  than  was  the  case  in  the 
'thirties.  Organizations  are  likely  to  be  initiated  from  the  top  by 
existing  union  powers,  for  when  unionization  is  quasi-spontane- 
ous, new  and  more  militant  leaders  have  better  chances  to  come 
to  the  top.  The  CIO  organizing  drives  of  the  'thirties  split  the  old 
union  world  and,  largely  in  response  to  worker  demands,  gave 
rise  to  new  men  of  power,  who  for  a  historical  moment  seemed 
free  to  choose  new  union  alternatives. 

But  that  happened  when  only  3.4  million  workers  were  organ- 
ized; now  15.4  million  are  members.  Labor  is  so  big,  and  the 
legal  requirements  so  much  more  complex,  that  the  chance  for 
new  types  of  leaders  to  emerge  in  connection  with  organizing 
drives  is  rather  limited.  Of  course,  techniques  and  tactics  of  or- 
ganizing may  appropriately  differ,  and  leaders  possessing  a  rhet- 
oric more  congenial  to  white-collar  employees  may  arise,  but  in 
the  natural  course  of  affairs,  older  men  already  in  power  will  se- 
lect and  encourage  types  of  men  not  too  different  from  them- 
selves. 

Established  powers  at  established  headquarters,  and  the  men 
they  favor,  will  run  the  drives  and  probably  manage  any  new 
unions  that  are  formed.  New  leaders  will  rise  and  old  ones  will 
fall,  but  there  is  not  much  chance  for  white-collar  unions  to 
emerge  as  a  new  type  of  organization  or  for  new  types  of  white- 
collar  leaders  to  gain  great  power. 

II.  The  psychology  of  white-collar  unionism,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  not  different  from  that  of  wage- workers;  in  both  cases  it  is  ex- 
pedient and  instrumental,  rather  than  principled  or  ideological. 
Of  course,  unions  of  carpenters  differ  in  shape  and  policy  from 
unions  of  auto  workers  or  insurance  salesmen  or  clerks.  But  the 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  317 

common  denominators  of  unionism  are  not  divided  according  to 
white-collar  and  wage-worker  types. 

A  few  speculations  on  either  side  of  the  issue,  however,  need 
to  be  made.  It  can  be  argued  that  white-collar  unionists  will  turn 
out  to  be  more  cautious  and  less  militant  because  the  style  of  life 
of  white-collar  people,  as  contrasted  with  that  of  workers  in  the 
mass-production  fields,  throws  them  into  contact  with  the  gen- 
eral (middle-class)  culture,  routines  of  information,  and  dom- 
inant values.  They  have  more  chances  to  belong  to  other  organi- 
zations, so  unionism  will  mean  even  less  in  their  political  and  so- 
cial lives  than  it  has  meant  in  the  lives  of  steel,  auto,  or  coal 
workers.  Because  of  their  cleaner,  more  prestigeful  work,  and 
their  consciousness  of  the  blue-shirted  masses  below  them,  they 
will  feel  that  they  have  more  to  lose  from  militant  unionism  that 
might  fail.  Since  many  of  them  are  of  middle-class  origin,  their 
biographical  ties  with  entrepreneurial  elements  will  restrain 
them.  Furthermore,  since  other  white-collar  employees  are  of 
wage-worker  origin  and  connection,  the  white-collar  mass  will  be 
divided  in  allegiance  and  hence  waver  in  policy  and  action. 

There  is  some  truth  in  each  of  these  points.  But  it  is  also  pos- 
sible to  argue,  with  a  measure  of  truth,  that  white-collar  unions 
will  be  more  militant  than  wage-worker  unions,  because  they 
will  be  young  at  power  bargaining  and  hence,  at  least  for  a  while, 
a  taste  of  power  will  prod  them  to  less  disciplined  and  more 
spontaneous  movement.  Having  claims  to  higher  prestige  than 
the  wage-worker,  having  more  links  with  the  older  middle  class, 
they  will  not  'take  it'  so  readily,  will  be  more  likely  to  stand  up 
higher  and  fight  harder.  Since  many  of  them  have  been  depend- 
ent upon  their  employers,  once  they  break  that  allegiance  and  go 
pro-union,  their  reaction  against  employers  is  likely  to  be 
stronger  and  more  aggressive.  Since  they  are  more  highly  edu- 
cated, once  they  get  the  union  slant,  they  will  have  a  greater 
capacity  to  generalize  it,  will  be  more  politically  and  ideologi- 
cally oriented  in  their  unionism. 

These  points,  too,  have  elements  of  truth.  Yet  neither  view 
stands  up  very  well.  Many  of  the  factors  in  support  of  the  idea 
that  white-collar  unions  will  be  more  militant  than  wage-worker 
unions  rest  upon  the  relative  smallness  and  youth  of  white-collar 


318  WAYS  OF  POWER 

unionism.  But  compared  with  wage-worker  unions  of  the  same 
size  and  age,  they  do  not  diflPer  from  them.  Many  of  the  factors  in 
support  of  the  idea  that  white-collar  unions  will  be  less  militant 
than  wage-worker  unions  rest  upon  differences  that,  in  the  course 
of  historical  development,  will  quite  likely  be  washed  away. 

The  lesson  from  the  historical  experience  of  unionism  in  the 
United  States,  which  of  course  need  not  be  a  dogmatic  lesson,  is 
that  wage-workers  and  white-collar  employees  in  due  course 
form  the  same  types  of  unions,  and  that  there  is  nothing  peculiar 
or  distinctive  about  white-collar  unionism;  that  variations  in 
terms  of  militancy  among  wage-worker  unions  and  among  white- 
collar  unions  are  just  as  slight  as  any  other  variations  between 
the  two. 

Trade  unions,  after  all,  are  the  most  reliable  instruments  to 
date  for  taming  and  channeling  lower-class  aspirations,  for  lining 
up  the  workers  without  internal  violence  during  time  of  war,  and 
for  controlling  their  insurgency  during  times  of  peace  and  de- 
pression. There  are  no  reasons  why  unions  should  not  perform 
the  same  services  among  white-collar  groups. 

One  historical  fact,  however,  must  be  noticed:  during  the  'thir- 
ties and  early  'forties,  larger  proportions  of  white-collar  than  of 
wage-worker  unionists  were  in  CIO  unions  controlled  by  Com- 
munist party  cliques.  In  the  CIO,  during  1948  about  4  out  of  10 
white-collar  members  were  in  CP  controlled  unions,  whereas 
only  about  2  out  of  10  wage-workers  were.  But  that  was  only 
within  the  CIO,  which  contains  vastly  more  wage-workers  than 
white-collar  employees.  If  we  base  our  calculations  on  the  union 
world  as  a  whole  (including  AFL  and  independents,  as  well  as 
CIO),  we  find  that  CP  factions  controlled  about  6  per  cent  of  un- 
ionized white-collar  workers  and  about  7  per  cent  of  unionized 
wage-workers. 

That  CP  factions  have  controlled  so  many  white-collar  unions 
within  the  CIO  is  more  a  historical  accident  of  the  CIO's  devel- 
opment than  a  sign  that  unionized  white-collar  workers  are  'more 
political'  than  wage-workers.  It  so  happens  that  these  white-collar 
unions  were  mainly  in  larger  cities,  especially  New  York,  which 
has  been  the  stronghold  of  the  Communist  Party  in  America. 
Moreover,  it  is  probably  true  that  this  party  has  appealed  quite 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  319 

strongly  to  the  petty  bourgeois  mentality  represented  by  many 
sectors  of  New  York's  white-collar  world. 

III.  The  old  radical  faith  that  the  mere  enlargement  of  unions 
is  good  because  it  brings  more  workers  into  'organizing  centers' 
is  now  naive,  as  is  the  belief  that  winning  the  white-collar  peo- 
ple to  unionism  is  necessarily  'a  link  to  the  middle  class.'  Both 
ideas  depend  on  the  kinds  of  unions  that  prevail  and  what  their 
political  potential  may  be.  Both  ideas  have  assumed  that  unions 
are,  or  will  be  when  they  are  big  enough,  engines  of  radical  so- 
cial change,  that  they  will  conduct  themselves  with  militant  in- 
telligence and  intelligent  militancy. 

The  question  whether  or  not  the  unionization  of  white-collar 
workers  will  mean  that  labor  has  a  link  to  the  middle  classes  de- 
pends upon  the  definition  of  'middle  class'  and  of  'labor.'  The 
question  is  inherited  from  the  rhetoric  of  Socialist  movements,  in 
which  'labor'  means  proletariat— a  politically  conscious  group 
separated  from  the  rest  of  society,  and  assumed  to  be  the  motor 
of  all  historic  change— and  in  which  'middle  class'  means  'strata 
with  entrepreneurial  ideology.' 

But  American  labor,  as  expressed  in  unions,  is  now  politically 
a  set  of  pressure  groups,  and  white-collar  workers,  especially 
when  they  join  unions,  increasingly  assume  the  pressure-group 
kind  of  labor  mentality. 

The  question  whether  white-collar  workers  form  'a  new  mid- 
dle class'  or  'a  new  proletariat'  is  being  answered,  as  we  have 
seen,  by  changes  in  both  classes,  as  well  as  by  changes  in  the 
kind  of  organizations  U.S.  labor  unions  have  become.  Economi- 
cally, the  white-collar  strata  are  less  'middle  class'  than  has  been 
supposed;  socially  and  ideologically,  the  wage-workers  are  more 
'middle  class'  than  has  been  supposed.  In  the  bureaucratic  scene 
in  which  social  change  now  occurs,  organizations,  not  sponta- 
neously alerted  classes,  often  monopolize  the  chances  for  action. 
And  in  the  world  of  organizations  and  interest  groups,  the  white- 
collar  and  wage-worker  strata  come  together  in  a  kind  of  lower 
middle-class  pressure  bloc. 

Politically,  the  presence  of  more  white-collar  workers  in  labor 
unions  will  give  liberal  and  labor  spokesmen  a  chance  more  truth- 
fully to  identify  'the  interests  of  labor'  with  those  of  the  commu- 


320  WAYS  OF  POWER 

nity  as  a  whole.  The  mass  base  of  labor  as  a  pressure  group  will 
be  further  extended,  and  labor  spokesmen  will  inevitably  be  in- 
volved in  more  far-reaching  bargains  over  the  national  political 
economy. 

5.   Unions  and  Politics 

No  matter  what  unionism  may  mean  to  the  individual  white- 
collar  worker,  organizationally  it  brings  the  white-collar  strata 
into  labor  as  an  interest  group.  Unless  white-collar  unions  de- 
velop a  distinctive  program  of  their  own— and  there  seems  to 
be  no  tendency  in  that  direction— or  unless  the  meaning  of 
unionism  to  them  becomes  politically  distinctive— and  it  appar- 
ently does  not— white-collar  unionism  will  carry  the  same  mean- 
ing as  wage-worker  unionism.  Therefore,  what  white-collar  un- 
ions mean  for  America  depends  on  what  U.S.  unions  in  general 
mean. 

So  far,  that  meaning  has  been  felt  mainly  in  the  economic 
sphere,  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  unions  for  white-collar  work- 
ers will  increase  their  chance  to  have  a  voice  in  their  conditions 
of  work  and  levels  of  pay.  But  the  larger  meaning  of  unionism  in- 
volves the  question  of  democracy  and  labor  unions,  that  is,  the 
question  of  whether  the  unions  are  to  become  a  movement,  or 
whether  they  are  going  to  become  another  vested  interest,  an 
agency  of  political  regulation  at  an  economic  price.  Or,  in  the 
words  of  Lionel  Trilling,  whether  'the  conflict  of  capital  and  la- 
bor is  a  contest  for  the  possession  of  the  goods  of  a  single  way  of 
life'  or  a  'culture  struggle.' 

For  a  long  time  the  unions,  considered  nationally,  were  a  set  of 
largely  'un-invested'  organizations.  Up  to  the  middle  'thirties,  they 
were  thought  to  be  able  to  go  either  way:  as  a  free  movement, 
they  would  grow  bigger  and  yet  retain  their  freedom  to  act,  and 
they  would  strive  to  act  in  a  way  that  would  re-order  U.S.  society 
in  the  image  of  a  libertarian  and  secure  society;  or  as  a  set  of 
interests,  they  would  attempt  to  vest  themselves  within  the 
framework  of  capitalist  society  and  the  administrative  state. 

Along  this  last  road,  unions  might  take  stands  on  broader  is- 
sues, but  only  in  bargaining  with  other  vested  interests.  Their 
spokesmen  might  talk  of  responsibility,  but  only  in  this  mean- 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  321 

ing:  those  to  whom  I  say  I  am  responsible  are  those  whom  I 
seek  to  manage.  The  'responsibility'  of  those  who  in  gaining 
power  have  become  hampered  in  their  action  is  often  a  respon- 
sibility to  regulate  the  discontent  of  the  underlying  strata,  in  or- 
der that,  as  responsible  spokesmen  at  the  top,  they  may  deal  in  a 
more  intelligent  and  practical  way  with  other  spokesmen. 

The  question  of  democracy  and  unionism  is  a  question  whether 
in  protecting  the  employees'  economic  position  by  an  adroit 
struggle  among  organized  interest  blocs,  the  unions  will  be 
forced  to  become  'watchdogs'  over  the  working  of  the  economy 
as  a  whole.  And  there  is  a  second  question:  whether  in  being 
watchdogs  over  the  economy,  as  against  being  merely  an  interest 
group  within  it,  the  unions  will  be  forced  to  take  on  a  larger  cul- 
tural and  political  struggle.  We  say  'forced'  because  present  labor 
leadership  does  not  encourage  us  to  believe  that  labor  leaders  as 
a  general  rule  will  do  so  from  any  sort  of  conviction,  much  less 
any  vision  of  the  need. 

Historical  experience,  as  well  as  the  character  of  present-day 
labor  leadership,  says  No  to  these  questions,  but  neither  presents 
a  conclusive  argument.  Labor  leadership  changes,  although 
change  is  likely  to  be  more  difficult  in  the  future  than  in  the  past; 
and  historical  experience  must  be  countered,  in  a  balanced  judg- 
ment, by  the  mid-century  facts  of  the  social  structure. 

In  the  main  drift  of  this  structure,  the  point  to  watch  is  the 
type  and  the  extent  of  labor's  involvement  with  business  corpo- 
rations and  with  the  administrative  state.  How  much  free  action, 
just  what  kind,  in  what  spheres,  for  approximately  what  ends— 
these  are  the  questions  we  must  be  asking  ourselves  about  U.S. 
labor  in  the  coming  decade.  The  main  drift  now  involves  four 
coinciding  trends: 

(1)  Economically  practical  conservatism,  expressed  by  such 
men  as  Robert  Taft,  is  being  overtaken  and  supplanted  by  polit- 
ically sophisticated  conservatism— a  conservatism  that  is  aware 
of  the  political  conditions  of  modern  profit  working  and  economic 
power,  and  of  the  kind  of  softening  co-operation  with  unions  that 
is  needed  to  control  them.  ( 2 )  Liberalism,  now  almost  a  common 
denominator  of  U.S.  politics,  becomes  administrative  liberalism, 
a  powerful  and  more  absorptive  state  framework,  within  which 
open  political  struggles  are  being  translated  into  administrative 


322  WAYS  OF  POWER 

procedures  and  pressures.  (3)  The  labor  interest,  coinciding  with 
sophisticated  conservatism,  is  being  vested  within  this  adminis- 
trative state  and  is  in  fact  becoming  one  of  its  major  supporting 
pillars;  labor  is  committed  to  the  support  of  this  state,  and,  in 
turn,  draws  much  of  its  strength  from  it.  (4)  All  these  develop- 
ments are  going  on  within  the  building  of  a  total  war  economy 
during  an  era  with  no  treaty-structured  peace  in  Europe  or  Asia. 

U.S.  labor,  like  U.S.  small  business,  seems  to  be  trying  to  fol- 
low the  route  of  the  U.S.  farmer.  Once  this  farmer  was  a  source 
of  insurgency  of  a  kind;  in  the  recent  past,  labor  has  seemed  to 
be  such.  Now  the  farmer  is  often  a  fat  unit  in  an  organized  farm 
bloc,  firmly  entrenched  within  and  pressuring  the  welfare  state. 
Despite  its  greater  objective  antagonism  to  capitalism  as  a  wage 
system,  labor  seems  to  be  trying  to  go  the  same  way;  its  leaders, 
following  the  policy  of  success,  would  apparently  model  the  po- 
litical role  of  their  organizations  upon  those  of  the  farmer.  Talk 
of  farm-labor  unity,  which  used  to  rest  upon  a  unity  of  insurgents, 
now  seems  to  rest  upon  attempted  bargains  between  two  pres- 
sure groups. 

Unlike  farmers,  and  unlike  wage-workers,  white-collar  employ- 
ees were  born,  too  late  to  have  even  a  brief  day  of  autonomy;  their 
structural  position  and  available  strategy  make  them  rearguard- 
ers  rather  than  movers  and  shakers  of  historic  change.  Their  un- 
ionization is  a  unionization  into  the  main  drift  and  serves  to  in- 
corporate them  as  part  of  the  newest  interest  to  be  vested  in  the 
liberal  state. 

The  story  of  labor  in  the  Franklin  Roosevelt  era  encouraged 
hope  because  labor  was  then  emerging  for  the  first  time  on  any 
American  scale;  it  had  little  need  of  any  sense  of  direction  other 
than  to  'organize  the  unorganized.'  But  in  Truman's  Fair  Deal 
this  is  not  the  case:  not  the  mandate  of  the  slump,  but  the  farm- 
er's fear  that  his  enormous  prosperity  might  be  taken  away  from 
him;  not  millions  of  unemployed,  but  labor's  fear  that  Taft-Hart- 
ley acts  will  be  used  against  existing  unions  are  the  underpin- 
nings of  this  administration.  Then  thought  of  war  was  not  dom- 
inant, and  men  of  power  could  pay  serious  attention  to  the  dis- 
tribution of  domestic  power;  now  fear  of  war  hangs  over  all  po- 


WHITE-COLLAR  UNIONISM  323 

litical  speculation  and  deadens  the  political  will  for  new  domestic 
beginnings. 

There  are  counter-tendencies  to  the  main  drift,  and  there  are 
possible  crises  in  the  increasingly  rigid  structure  that  would  unite 
and  allow  these  tendencies  to  assert  themselves  as  historical 
forces.  But  in  the  meantime,  if  the  future  of  democracy  in  Amer- 
ica is  imperiled,  it  is  not  by  any  labor  movement,  but  by  its  ab- 
sence, and  the  substitution  for  it  of  a  new  set  of  vested  interests. 
If  these  new  interests  often  seem  of  particular  peril  to  democratic 
social  structure,  it  is  because  they  are  so  large  and  yet  so  hesi- 
tant. Their  business  may  well  become  the  regulation  of  insur- 
gent tendencies  among  those  groups  and  strata  that  might  re- 
organize American  society  out  of  its  frenzied  order  of  slump 
and  boom  and  war,  and  stop  its  main  drift  toward  a  society  in 
which  men  are  the  managed  personnel  of  a  garrison  state. 


15 


The  Politics  of  the  Rearguard 


The  political  psychology  of  any  social  stratum  is  influenced  by 
every  relation  its  members  have,  or  fail  to  have,  with  other  strata; 
all  the  objective  and  subjective  factors  to  which  they  are  exposed 
play  into  their  political  psychology.  Composed  as  they  are  of  a 
wide  range  of  in-between  occupational  groups,  the  new  middle 
classes  are  especially  open  to  many  cross-pressures,  as  well  as  to 
all  those  larger  forces  that  more  or  less  define  the  structure  and 
atmosphere  of  modern  society. 

To  understand  the  political  form  and  content  of  white-collar 
mentality,  we  must  first  understand  what  political  consciousness, 
as  well  as  lack  of  it,  means;  to  understand  how  it  has  been 
shaped,  we  must  explore  the  effects  on  it  of  the  mass  media  of 
communication,  of  the  social-historical  structure,  and  of  the 
political  institutions  and  traditions  that  have  prevailed  in  the 
United  States. 

1.  Models  of  Consciousness 

Our  most  familiar  model  of  political  consciousness  is  liberal- 
ism, which  in  focusing  upon  the  individual  citizen  has  tried  to 
enlarge  his  political  rights,  his  formal  opportunities  to  act  politi- 
cally and  to  be  political.  It  has  assumed  that  once  given  the 
rights,  the  individual  citizen  would  naturally  become  politically 
alerted  and  act  on  his  political  interests.  It  might  be  that  he 
would  require  more  education,  but  education  was  one  of  the 
rights  that  liberalism  sought  to  make  universal. 

324 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  325 

The  difficulties  of  liberalism's  assumption  of  the  alert  citizen 
were  well  stated  by  Walter  Lippmann  in  the  early  'twenties.  His 
point  was  that  the  citizen  was  unable  to  know  what  was  going  on 
politically,  to  think  about  it  straight,  or  to  act  upon  it  intelli- 
gently. There  was  a  great  gap  between  individual  men,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  events  and  decisions  of  power,  on  the  other;  this 
gap  was  filled  by  the  media  of  communication,  which,  in  their 
necessity  to  compress  the  volume  of  communication  into  short- 
hand slogans,  created  a  pseudo-environment  of  stereotypes  that 
stood  for  the  unseen  political  world  and  to  which  the  citizen  re- 
acted. In  the  great  society,  the  citizen  had  no  time  to  study  things 
out,  his  politically  fruitful  contact  with  others  as  well  as  with  the 
media  of  communications  being  limited  to  fifteen  or  twenty  min- 
utes a  day.  These  facts,  in  addition  to  those  of  artificial  censor- 
ship and  the  fear  of  facing  realities  that  might  disturb  routine, 
added  up  to  this,  that  the  political  alertness  required  of  the  citi- 
zen by  liberal  theory  was  based  on  a  woefully  Utopian,  rational 
psychology,  which  might  make  sense  in  a  simpler  democratic 
set-up  but  was  impossible  in  modern  society.  No  one  of  liberal 
persuasion  has  refuted  Lippmann's  analysis. 

The  other  familiar  model  of  political-consciousness,  Marxism, 
has  focused  upon  the  class  rather  than  the  individual.  It  is  an  in- 
genious model  which  reaches  from  gross  material  conditions,  an 
chored  in  property,  into  the  inner  consciousness  of  men  of  simi- 
lar class  positions.  Class-consciousness  has  always  been  under- 
stood as  a  political  consciousness  of  one's  own  rational  class  inter- 
ests and  their  opposition  to  the  interests  of  other  classes.  Eco- 
nomic potentiality  becomes  politically  realized:  a  'class  in  itself 
becomes  a  'class  for  itself.'  Thus  for  class  consciousness,  there 
must  be  (1)  a  rational  awareness  and  identification  with  one's 
own  class  interests;  (2)  an  awareness  of  and  rejection  of  other 
class  interests  as  illegitimate;  and  (3)  an  awareness  of  and  a 
readiness  to  use  collective  political  means  to  the  collective  politi- 
cal end  of  realizing  one's  interests. 

These  three  requirements  interact  in  various  ways,  depending 
upon  the  phase  of  the  movement  and  the  branch  of  Marxism  one 
examines.  Lenin  and  Trotsky,  for  instance,  placed  more  emphasis 
than  leaders  before  them  on  the  party  militants,  who  articulate 
rational  awareness,  as  a  key  to  the  development  of  mass  political 


326  WAYS  OF  POWER 

consciousness.  Yet,  underlying  the  general  Marxian  model  there 
is  always,  in  Louis  Clair's  words,  the  political  psychology  of  lae- 
coming  conscious  of  inherent  potentialities.'  This  idea  is  just  as 
rationalist  as  liberalism  in  its  psychological  assumptions.  For  the 
struggle  that  occurs  proceeds  on  the  rational  recognition  by  com- 
peting classes  of  incompatible  material  interests;  reflection  links 
material  fact  and  interested  consciousness  by  a  calculus  of  ad- 
vantage. As  Veblen  correctly  pointed  out,  the  idea  is  utilitarian, 
and  more  closely  related  to  Bentham  than  Hegel. 

Marx,  of  course,  allowed  for  'false  consciousness,'  by  which  he 
meant  an  untrue  calculation  of  interests.  He  explained  it  as  a 
rationalist  error,  due  to  ignorance  or,  in  more  willful  moods,  to 
a  lack  of  correct  proletarian  propaganda.  False  consciousness,  a 
mental  lag  from  previous  eras,  is  no  longer  in  line  with  present 
interests;  it  is  an  incorrect  interpretation  which  hides  the  real 
world  rather  than  reveals  it  in  a  manner  adequate  for  effective 
action. 

Both  Marxism  and  liberalism  make  the  same  rationalist  as- 
sumption that  men,  given  the  opportunity,  will  naturally  come  to 
political  consciousness  of  interests,  of  self  or  of  class.  Each 
in  its  own  way  has  been  more  concerned  with  enlarging  the  op- 
portunities for  men  to  play  political  roles  than  with  any  psycho- 
logical unwillingness  or  inability  on  their  part  to  do  so.  Since 
one  or  the  other  of  these  models  of  consciousness  usually  under- 
lies questions  and  answers  about  the  politics  of  various  social 
strata,  current  theories  do  not  usually  allow  for  the  view  that  a 
stratum  may  have  no  political  direction,  but  be  politically  pas- 
sive. Yet  such  indifference  is  the  major  sign  of  both  the  impasse 
of  liberalism  and  the  collapse  of  socialist  hopes.  It  is  also  at  the 
heart  of  the  political  malaise  of  our  time. 

To  be  politically  indifferent  is  to  be  a  stranger  to  all  political 
symbols,  to  be  alienated  from  politics  as  a  sphere  of  loyalties, 
demands,  and  hopes.  The  politically  indifferent  are  detached 
from  prevailing  political  symbols  but  have  no  new  attachments 
to  counter-symbols.  Whatever  insecurities  and  demands  and 
hopes  they  may  have  are  not  focused  politically,  their  personal 
desires  and  anxieties  being  segregated  from  political  symbols  and 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  327 

authorities.  Neither  objective  events  nor  internal  stresses  count 
pohtically  in  their  consciousness. 

Political  indiflFerence  does  not  necessarily  involve  a  collapse  of 
political  expectation;  it  is  not  necessarily  the  end  of  a  scale:  hope- 
ful, resigned,  despairing,  apathetic;  that  is  only  one  route  to  it, 
and  one  of  its  meanings.  Nor  is  political  indifference  necessarily 
irrational;  in  fact,  it  may  be  a  reasoned  cynicism,  which  distrusts 
and  debunks  all  available  political  loyalties  and  hopes  as  lack  of 
sophistication.  Or  it  may  be  the  product  of  an  extra-rational  con- 
sideration of  the  opportunities  available  to  men,  who,  with  Max 
Weber,  assert  that  they  can  live  without  belief  in  a  political 
world  gone  meaningless,  but  in  which  detached  intellectual  work 
is  still  possible.  For  men  less  burdened  with  insight  and  enjoying 
less  secure  class  positions,  indifference  frequently  co-exists  with 
a  minimum  sacrifice  of  time  and  self  to  some  meaningless  work, 
and  for  the  rest,  a  private  pursuit  of  activities  that  find  their 
meanings  in  the  immediate  gratification  of  animal  thrill,  sensa- 
tion, and  fun. 

To  be  politically  conscious,  either  in  loyalty  or  insurgency,  is 
to  see  a  political  meaning  in  one's  own  insecurities  and  desires, 
to  see  oneself  as  a  demanding  political  force,  which,  no  matter 
how  small,  increases  one's  hopes  that  expectations  will  come  off. 
To  be  politically  indifferent  is  to  see  no  political  meaning  in  one's 
life  or  in  the  world  in  which  one  lives,  to  avoid  any  political  dis- 
appointments or  gratifications.  So  political  symbols  have  lost  their 
effectiveness  as  motives  for  action  and  as  justifications  for  in- 
stitutions. 


2.  Political  indifference 

In  the  United  States  in  the  middle  of  the  twentieth  century, 
there  are,  of  course,  people  who  approximate  the  liberal  view  of 
the  citizen,  especially  among  the  educated  upper  middle  class; 
there  are  also  people  who  are  class-conscious  in  a  Marxian  sense, 
especially  among  the  upper  ranks  and,  in  a  derived  way,  among 
intellectuals.  There  are  also  people  who  display  all  the  necessary 
qualifications  for  political  loyalty,  and  some  who  fulfil  the  re- 
quirements for  the  insurgent. 


328  WAYS  OF  POWER 

But  the  most  decisive  comment  that  can  be  made  about  the 
state  of  U.S.  politics  concerns  the  facts  of  widespread  public 
indifference,  which  today  overshadow  in  significance  both  those 
of  loyalty  and  those  of  insurgency. 

In  our  political  literature,  we  do  not  have  many  attempts  to 
explain  the  facts  of  political  indifference,  perhaps  because  neither 
liberalism  nor  Marxism  raises  the  question  to  a  central  position. 
Yet,  we  are  now  in  a  situation  in  which  many  who  are  disen- 
gaged from  prevailing  allegiances  have  not  acquired  new  ones, 
and  so  are  distracted  from  and  inattentive  to  political  concerns  of 
any  kind.  They  are  strangers  to  politics.  They  are  not  radical,  not 
liberal,  not  conservative,  not  reactionary;  they  are  inactionary; 
they  are  out  of  it.  If  we  accept  the  Greek's  definition  of  the  idiot 
as  a  privatized  man,  then  Ive  must  conclude  that  the  U.S.  citi- 
zenry is  now  largely  composed  of  idiots. 

Our  knowledge  of  this  is  firmer  than  any  strict  proof  available 
to  us.  It  rests,  first  of  all,  upon  our  awareness,  as  politically  con- 
scious men  ourselves,  of  the  discrepancy  between  the  meaning 
and  stature  of  public  events  and  what  people  seem  most  inter- 
ested in. 

The  Second  World  War  was  understood  by  most  sensitive  ob- 
servers as  a  curiously  unreal  business.  Men  went  away  and 
fought,  all  over  the  world;  women  did  whatever  was  expected 
of  women  during  war;  people  worked  hard  and  long  and  bought 
war  bonds;  everybody  believed  in  America  and  in  her  cause; 
there  was  no  rebellion.  Yet  it  all  seemed  a  purposeless  kind  of 
efficiency.  Some  sort  of  numbness  seemed  to  prohibit  any  aware- 
ness of  the  magnitude  and  depth  of  what  was  happening;  it  was 
without  dream  and  so  without  nightmare,  and  if  there  was  anger 
and  fear  and  hatred,  and  there  was,  still  no  chords  of  feeling  and 
conviction  were  deeply  touched.  People  sat  in  the  movies  be- 
tween production  shifts,  watching  with  aloofness  and  even  visible 
indifference,  as  children  were  'saturation  bombed'  in  the  narrow 
cellars  of  European  cities.  Man  had  become  an  object;  and  in  so 
far  as  those  for  whom  he  was  an  object  felt  about  the  spectacle 
at  all,  they  felt  powerless,  in  the  grip  of  larger  forces,  having  no 
part  in  these  affairs  that  lay  beyond  their  immediate  areas  of 
daily  demand  and  gratification.  It  was  a  time  of  somnambulance. 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  329 

It  was  not  that  people  were  insensitive  clods  with  no  com- 
plaints, but  that  in  all  the  matter-of-fact  eflBciency,  no  mainspring 
of  feeling  was  let  loose  in  despair  or  furor;  that  no  complaints 
were  focused  rebelliously  upon  the  political  meanings  of  the 
universal  sacrifice  and  brutality.  It  was  not  that  people  in  the 
United  States  were  apathetically  dulled;  on  the  contrary,  they 
were  often  brightly  hopeful,  but  never  politically  so,  and  what 
used  to  be  called  the  deepest  convictions  seemed  fluid  as  water. 

It  was  as  if  the  expert  angle  of  the  camera  and  the  carefully 
nurtured,  pompous  voice  of  the  commentator  had  expropriated 
the  chance  to  'take  it  big.'  It  was  as  if  the  ear  had  become  a 
sensitive  soundtrack,  the  eye  a  precision  camera,  experience 
an  exactly  timed  collaboration  between  microphone  and  lens, 
the  machines  thus  taking  unto  themselves  the  capacity  for  ex- 
perience. And  as  the  world  of  this  mechanically  vivified  experi- 
ence was  expanded  a  hundredfold,  the  individual  became  a  spec- 
tator of  everything,  rather  than  an  experiencer  of  what  he  earned 
by  virtue  of  what  he  was  becoming.  There  were  no  plain  targets 
of  revolt;  and  the  cold  metropolitan  manner  had  so  entered  the 
soul  of  overpowered  men  that  they  were  made  completely  private 
and  blase,  down  deep  and  for  good. 

Many  observers  have  noted  the  decline  of  confidence  in  the 
future  that  had  prevailed  in  the  United  States  fifty  years  ago,  and 
its  replacement  by  apprehensiveness,  pessimism,  tension,  'spir- 
itual disillusionment'  with  the  social  order.  Some  time  after 
World  War  I,  American  democracy,  no  longer  a  widespread  con- 
fidence and  an  authentic  social  feeling,  became  an  objective  for 
oflBcial  propaganda.  It  became  official  and  conventional.  Over  the 
last  half  century,  Lloyd  Morris  has  remarked,  Americans  have 
become  a  people  whose  'freedom,  power,  material  advantages 
and  way  of  life  are  widely  envied  throughout  the  world;  but 
whose  confidence,  and  faith  in  their  future,  have  signally  dimin- 
ished.' There  has  been  a  parallel  development  of  mighty  prog- 
ress and  weak  disenchantment. 

The  fact  of  formal  democracy  is  not  widely  questioned,  but  the 
way  it  has  been  drifting  is.  An  anonymous  comment  on  an  Auden 
poem  concludes:  'All  the  committees  and  commissions  ...  in  the 


330  WAYS  OF  POWER 

Federal  Executive  Departments  and  Agencies,  all  the  employees 
of  all  the  states,  counties,  municipalities,  townships,  and  villages, 
are  our  employees  and  they  manage  oiu:  affairs  with  our  consent. 
All  the  judges,  all  the  police,  are  delegated  by  us  to  administer 
a  justice  that  they  do  not  invent  or  improvise  but  that  we  have 
invented  over  the  centuries.  .  .  We  have  our  managers  and  they 
...  do  not  push  us  off  the  sidewalks.  And  they  cannot  forget  us 
because  we  can  see  to  it  that  they  lose  their  jobs.  .  .  We  have  the 
best  system  in  the  world,  to  be  sure,  but  often  we  get  to  think- 
ing that  we  are  no  more  than  spectators  at  a  play— with  the  right 
to  watch  the  actors  ( the  managers )  come  and  go,  the  right  to  ap- 
plaud and  hiss,  and  even  to  put  on  other  actors.  But  not  the  right 
to  put  on  another  script.  For  the  play  seems  to  be  written  once 
and  for  all— and  not  by  us.' 

'What  appalls  us  is  that  it  is  not  written  by  the  managers 
either  ...  it  is  not  that  [the  two  wars]  came  to  us  against  our 
will;  it  is  that  they  came  to  us  from  some  zone  that  was  alto- 
gether outside  the  possibihty  of  being  affected  by  our  will.  The 
wars  came  neither  by  or  against  our  will.  Our  appointed  man- 
agers were  at  their  posts;  the  wars  enveloped  them  like  fog  drift- 
ing in  from  sea.  .  .  The  agonizing  question  is.  What  do  our  man- 
agers control?  Without  them,  there  is  anarchy.  With  them  there 
is  sometimes  the  feeling,  not  that  they  are  remote  from  us,  but 
that  the  matter  they  handle— the  matter  of  life  and  death— is 
remote  from  them.' 

It  might  be  thought  that  our  inherited  standard  of  political 
alertness  is  too  high,  that  only  in  crises  can  it  be  achieved.  But 
this  does  not  confront  the  problem  at  its  true  level,  and  lacks  an 
adequate  conception  of  'crisis.'  Crises  have  involved  the  pub- 
hcity  of  alternatives,  usually  forced  alternatives.  But  what  if  the 
authorities  face  and  choose  alternatives  without  publicity?  In  a 
system  of  power  as  centralized  as  ours,  'crises'  in  the  old-fash- 
ioned sense  occur  only  when  something  slips,  when  there  is  a 
leak;  and  in  the  meantime,  decisions  of  vital  consequence  are 
made  behind  our  backs.  The  meaning  of  crisis  has  to  be  made 
clear  before  it  can  be  hopefully  asserted  that  political  ahenation 
will  be  replaced  by  alertness  only  in  crises.  For  today  there  are 
crises  not  pubhoized  for  popular  political  decision  but  which 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  331 

carry  much  larger  consequences  than  many  pubhcized  crises  of 
the  past. 

It  is  a  sense  of  our  general  condition  that  lies  back  of  our  con- 
viction that  political  estrangement  in  America  is  widespread  and 
decisive.  There  are,  of  course,  shallower  even  though  more  pre- 
cise indicators,  for  instance,  the  meaning  and  extent  of  the  vote. 
To  vote  is  not  necessarily  to  be  politically  involved;  nor  failure 
to  vote  to  be  politically  alienated.  Perhaps  as  high  as  80  per  cent 
of  those  who  do  vote  feel  they  owe  it  to  their  families'  tradition 
of  voting  one  way  or  the  other.  In  the  majority  of  cases  the  vote 
indicates  a  traditional  loyalty  not  to  a  set  of  principles  or  even 
to  a  consistent  party  position,  but  to  a  family  traditionally  at- 
tached to  one  or  another  party  label.  Voting  does  not  typically 
involve  political  expectations  of  great  moment,  and  such  de- 
mands as  it  entails  are  formalized  and  not  often  connected  with 
personal  troubles.  Only  a  little  over  half  of  the  people  eligible 
to  vote  do  so,  which  means  that  the  United  States  is  a  govern- 
ment by  default  as  much  as  by  positive  election:  it  is  the  50  mil- 
lion who  do  not  vote  who  determine  the  outcomes  as  much  as 
those  who  do. 

The  upsurge  of  trade  unionism,  involving  as  it  does  about  one- 
third  of  the  people  at  work,  might  be  taken  as  an  indication  of 
a  rudimentary  form  of  political  insurgency.  But  trade  unionism, 
as  we  have  seen,  does  not  typically  question  prevailing  symbols, 
has  not  typically  involved  counter-symbols.  Its  usual  demands 
are  for  a  larger  slice  of  the  going  yield,  and  its  conscious  expec- 
tations are  short-run  expectations  of  immediate  material  improve- 
ments, not  of  any  change  in  the  system  of  work  and  life. 

So,  in  their  present  shape  and  motives,  neither  patronage  par- 
ties nor  trade  unions  are  tokens  of  widespread  political  conscious- 
ness, either  of  deeper  loyalty  or  alerted  insurgency. 

The  white-collar  people  are  probably  no  more  or  no  less  politi- 
cally alienated  than  other  large  strata;  in  fact,  judging  from  the 
indices  available,  they  seem  to  be  in-between.  Thus,  41  per  cent 
of  them,  as  against  59  per  cent  of  the  business  and  professional 
and  33  per  cent  of  the  wage-workers,  said  they  had  given  'much 
thought'  rather  than  'little  thought'  to  the  election  for  presi- 
dency in  1948.  In  this,  the  white-collar  proportion  was  the  same 
as  the  national  average.  The  same  is  true  with  respect  to  partici- 


332  WAYS  OF  POWER 

pation  in  voting;  every  indication  available  reveals  them  as  ex- 
actly average,  between  business  and  labor.* 

When  it  was  believed,  correctly  or  not,  that  the  workers  formed 
an  identifiable  camp,  it  could  be  asserted  that  the  white-collar 
man  was  spiritually  powerless  because  he  could  not  find  his  way 
to  the  workers  at  a  time  when  the  house  of  middle-class  concepts 
and  feelings  had  collapsed.  But  whatever  house  the  workers 
might  have  been  thought  to  be  building  has  not  been  built.  Now 
there  are  no  centers  of  firm  and  uniform  identification.  Po- 
litical alienation  and  spiritual  homelessness  are  widespread. 

How  has  this  political  indifference  come  about?  What  are  the 
factors  that  regulate  the  state  of  political  alienation  in  America 
today?  We  cannot  understand  the  political  role  of  the  new  middle 
class  until  we  have  explained  why  in  the  United  States  today 
people  of  all  classes  are  more  or  less  politically  indifferent.  In 
trying  to  explain  it,  we  shall  pay  attention,  first,  to  the  political 
contents  and  function  of  the  mass  media  of  communication;  sec- 
ond, to  certain  features  of  the  social-historical  structure  of  the 
United  States  which  have  formed  the  character  of  its  political 
sphere;  and  third,  to  the  salient  characteristics  of  U.S.  political 
institutions  themselves. 

3.  The  Mass  Media 

To  believe  that  'the  ideology  wherein  men  become  conscious 
of  class  conflict  and  fight  it  out'  is  determined  solely  by  'material 
contradictions'  is  to  overlook  the  positive  role  of  the  mass  media 
of  communications.  If  the  consciousness  of  men  does  not  deter- 
mine their  existence,  neither  does  their  material  existence  deter- 
mine their  consciousness.  Between  consciousness  and  existence 

'  Somewhat  more  than  one-third  of  the  white-collar  people,  polled 
in  the  late  'forties,  felt  the  Republican  party  best  served  their  interests, 
about  one-third  that  the  Democratic  party  did;  the  rest  bebeved  that 
there  was  no  difference  between  the  parties  on  this  point  or  had  no 
opinion.  The  1948  poll  vote  by  occupation  is  not  considered  reliable. 
Analysis  of  the  1936,  1940,  and  1944  presidential  elections  reveals  in 
each  case  that  the  white-collar  vote  was  intermediate  between  the 
extremes  of  business  and  unskilled  labor.  In  1936  (proportions  for 
Roosevelt):  business,  47;  white  collar,  61;  unskilled  labor,  81.  In 
1940:  business,  34;  white  collar,  48;  unskilled  labor,  69.  In  1944; 
business,  35;  white  collar,  49;  unskilled  labor,  59. 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  333 

stand  communications,  which  influence  such  consciousness  as 
men  have  of  their  existence.  Men  do  'enter  into  definite,  neces- 
sary relations  which  are  independent  of  their  will,'  but  communi- 
cations enter  to  slant  the  meanings  of  these  relations  for  those 
variously  involved  in  them.  The  forms  of  political  consciousness 
may,  'in  the  end,  be  relative  to  the  means  of  production,  but,  in 
the  beginning,  they  are  relative  to  the  contents  of  the  communi- 
cation media. 

In  Marx's  day  there  was  no  radio,  no  movies,  no  television; 
there  was  only  printed  matter,  which,  as  he  demonstrated  several 
times,  was  in  such  shape  that  it  was  possible  for  an  enterprising 
individual  to  start  up  a  newspaper  or  magazine.  It  was  easier  to 
overlook  the  role  of  mass  media  or  to  underplay  it,  when  they 
were  not  so  persuasive  in  effect  and  yet  were  more  widely  acces- 
sible and,  despite  political  censorship,  more  widely  competitive. 

What  Edward  Ross  said  of  custom  also  applies  to  the  mass 
media  today:  their  main  prop  is  'the  dread  of  self-mutilation.  For 
to  give  up  the  customary  [or  the  mass-media  routine]  is  to  alien- 
ate portions  of  one's  self,  to  tear  away  the  sheath  that  protects 
our  substance.'  Commercial  jazz,  soap  opera,  pulp  fiction,  comic 
strips,  the  movies  set  the  images,  mannerisms,  standards,  and 
aims  of  the  urban  masses.  In  one  way  or  another,  everyone  is 
equal  before  these  cultural  machines;  like  technology  itself,  the 
mass  media  are  nearly  universal  in  their  incidence  and  appeal. 
They  are  a  kind  of  common  denominator,  a  kind  of  scheme  for 
pre-scheduled,  mass  emotions. 

In  these  mass  arts,  instead  of  form  there  is  formula;  they  lead 
'to  no  final  revelation,'  but  exhaust  themselves  immediately  as 
they  appear.  As  Milton  Klonsky  has  observed,  'it  is  the  great  in- 
distinction  of  both  the  mass  arts  and  contemporary  life  that  they 
reflect  one  another  so  closely,  feature  by  feature,  it  is  almost  im- 
possible to  tell  the  image  from  its  source.  Both  collaborate  to 
form  a  common  myth.  .  .  The  fictive  heroes  of  this  myth  are  the 
archetypes  to  which  the  masses  try  to  conform,  and  the  dies  from 
which  they  stamp  their  own  behavior.'  We  are  so  submerged  in 
the  pictures  created  by  mass  media  that  we  no  longer  really  see 
them,  much  less  the  objects  they  supposedly  represent.  The  truth 
is,  as  the  media  are  now  organized,  they  expropriate  our  vision. 

There  is  the  e\entful  scene  itself,  the  pictures  of  the  scene,  and 


334  WAYS  OF  POWER 

the  response  to  it.  Between  scene  and  response  is  the  picture, 
given  by  the  mass  media.  Events  outside  the  narrow  scene  of  the 
weekly  routine  have  httle  meaning  and  in  fact  are  mostly  not 
known  except  as  they  are  omitted,  refracted,  or  reported  in  the 
mass  media.  The  mass-communication  system  of  the  United 
States  is  not  autonomous:  it  reflects  society,  but  selectively;  it 
reinforces  certain  features  by  generalizing  them,  and  out  of  its 
selections  and  reinforcements  creates  a  world.  In  so  far  as  people 
live  beyond  their  immediate  range  of  contacts,  it  is  in  this  world 
they  must  live. 

The  forms  and  contents  of  political  consciousness,  or  their  ab- 
sence, cannot  be  understood  without  reference  to  the  world  cre- 
ated and  sustained  by  these  media.  The  deprivations  and  insecu- 
rities arising  from  structural  positions  and  historic  changes  are 
not  likely  to  be  politically  symbolized  if  these  media  do  not  take 
them  up  in  appropriate  contexts,  and  thus  lend  generalized,  com- 
municable meaning  to  them.  Class-consciousness  or  its  absence, 
for  example,  involves  not  merely  the  individual's  experience  in 
and  of  some  objective  class-situation,  but  the  communications  to 
which  he  is  exposed.  What  he  comes  to  believe  about  the  whole 
range  of  issues  is  in  some  way  a  function  of  his  experienced  situ- 
ation, plus  his  first-hand  contact  with  other  people,  plus  his  ex- 
posure to  mass  media.  And  it  is  often  the  latter  which  gives  him 
his  standard  of  reality,  his  standard  of  experience. 

The  contents  of  the  mass  media  are  now  a  sort  of  common  de- 
nominator of  American  experience,  feeling,  belief,  and  aspiration. 
They  extend  across  the  diversified  material  and  social  environ- 
ments, and,  reaching  lower  into  the  age  hierarchy,  are  received 
long  before  the  age  of  consent,  without  explicit  awareness.  Con- 
tents of  the  mass  media  seep  into  our  images  of  self,  becoming 
that  which  is  taken  for  granted,  so  imperceptibly  and  so  surely 
that  to  modify  them  drastically,  over  a  generation  or  two,  would 
be  to  change  profoundly  modern  man's  experience  and  character. 

The  world  created  by  the  mass  media  contains  very  little  dis- 
cussion of  political  meanings,  not  to  speak  of  their  dramatization, 
or  sharp  demands  and  expectations.  Instead,  on  the  explicitly 
tagged  political  level,  the  media  display,  the  short  news  flash,  and 
the  headlined  column  or  snippet,  the  few  round-tables  and  edi- 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  335 

torials.  In  these,  the  mass  media  plug  for  ruling  political  symbols 
and  personalities;  but  in  their  attempts  to  enforce  conventional 
attachment  to  them,  they  standardize  and  reiterate  until  these 
symbols  and  personalities  become  completely  banal,  and  men  are 
attached  to  them  only,  as  to  a  brand  of  clothes,  by  convention- 
alized reaction.  The  whole  marketing  animus  is  put  behind  pre- 
vailing cliches;  politics  is  squeezed  into  formulas  which  are  re- 
peated and  repeated;  in  the  words  of  the  advertising  manual,  you 
'make  contact,  arouse  interest,  create  preference,  make  specific 
proposals,  close  the  order.'  *Ad  drives'  are  set  up  'to  sell  the  U.S. 
system,'  with  an  'agency  task  force'  whose  number  one  job  is  to 
'stress  the  free  enterprise  aim'  and  'point  out  to  the  American 
people  that  management,  labor  and  all  other  groups  are  agreed 
that  the  American  system  should  work  towards  the  basic  objec- 
tive of  better  living  .  .  .'  and  so  on.  The  prevailing  symbols  are 
presented  in  such  a  contrived  and  pompous  civics-book  manner, 
or  in  such  a  falsely  human  light,  as  to  preclude  Hvely  involve- 
ments and  deep-felt  loyalties. 

At  the  same  time,  the  mass  media  do  not  display  counter-loyal- 
ties and  demands  to  the  ruling  loyalties  and  demands  which  they 
make  banal.  They  are  polite,  disguising  indiflFerence  as  tolerance 
and  broadmindedness;  and  they  further  buttress  the  disfavor  in 
which  those  who  are  'against  things'  are  held.  They  trivialize 
issues  into  personal  squabbles,  rather  than  humanize  them  by 
asserting  their  meanings  for  you  and  for  me.  They  formalize  ad- 
herence to  prevailing  symbols  by  pious  standardization  of  worn- 
out  phrases,  and  when  they  are  'serious,'  they  merely  get  detailed 
about  more  of  the  same,  rather  than  give  big  close-ups  of  the 
human  meanings  of  political  events  and  decisions.  Their  detailed 
coverage  is  probably  not  attended  to  except  by  those  already  in- 
terested, the  slanted  material  only  by  those  already  in  agreement 
with  the  slant.  They  reinforce  interest  and  slant,  but  do  not 
arouse  interest  by  exposing  genuine  clash.  The  ruling  symbols 
are  so  inflated  in  the  mass  media,  the  ideological  speed-up  is  so 
great,  that  such  symbols,  in  their  increased  volume,  intensifica- 
tion, and  persuasion,  are  worn  out  and  distrusted.  The  mass 
media  hold  a  monopoly  of  the  ideologically  dead;  they  spin 
records  of  political  emptiness.  To  banalize  prevailing  sym- 
bols and  omit  counter-symbols,  but  above  all,  to  divert  from  the 


336  WAYS  OF  POWER 

explicitly  political,  and  by  contrast  with  other  interests  to  make 
'politics'  dull  and  threadbare— that  is  the  political  situation  of  the 
mass  media,  which  reflect  and  reinforce  the  political  situation  of 
the  nation. 

The  explicit  political  content  of  the  mass  media  is,  after  all, 
a  very  small  portion  of  their  managed  time  and  space.  This 
badly  handled  content  must  compete  with  a  whole  machinery 
of  amusement,  within  a  marketing  context  of  distrust.  The  most 
skilled  media  men  and  the  highest  paid  talent  are  devoted  to  the 
glamorous  worlds  of  sport  and  leisure.  These  competing  worlds, 
which  in  their  modern  scale  are  only  30  years  old,  divert  atten- 
tion from  politics  by  providing  a  set  of  continuing  interests  in 
mythical  figures  and  fast-moving  stereotypes.  The  old-fashioned 
political  rally,  to  which  men  traveled  in  the  world  of  the  small 
entrepreneur,  when  politics  were  not  crucial,  is  replaced  by  an 
elaboration  of  dazzling  alternatives  to  which  men  in  the  new 
society,  when  politics  are  objectively  crucial,  can  turn  without 
movement  of  body  or  mind. 

The  attention  absorbed  by  the  images  on  the  screen's  rectangle 
dominates  the  darkened  public;  the  sonorous,  the  erotic,  the  mys- 
terious, the  funny  voice  of  the  radio  talks  to  you;  the  thrill  of  the 
easy  murder  relaxes  you.  In  our  life-situation,  they  simply  fasci- 
nate. And  their  effects  run  deep:  popular  culture  is  not  tagged  as 
'propaganda'  but  as  entertainment;  people  are  often  exposed  to 
it  when  most  relaxed  of  mind  and  tired  of  body;  and  its  charac- 
ters offer  easy  targets  of  identification,  easy  answers  to  stereo- 
typed personal  problems. 

The  image  of  success  and  its  individuated  psychology  are  the 
most  lively  aspects  of  popular  culture  and  the  greatest  diversion 
from  politics.  Virtually  all  the  images  of  popular  culture  are  con- 
cerned with  individuals,  and  more,  with  particular  kinds  of  indi- 
viduals succeeding  by  individual  ways  to  individual  goals.  Fic- 
tion and  non-fiction,  movies  and  radio— indeed  almost  every 
aspect  of  contemporary  mass  communication— accentuate  indi- 
vidual success.  Whatever  is  done  is  done  by  individual  effort,  and 
if  a  group  is  involved,  it  strings  along  after  the  extraordinary 
leader.  There  is  displayed  no  upward  climb  of  and  by  collective 
action  to  political  goals,  but  individuals  succeeding,  by  strictly 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  337 

personal  efforts  in  a  hostile  environment,  to  personal  economic 
and  erotic  goals. 

Dramatization  in  popular  art  has  always  involved  the  personal- 
ities of  social  life,  even  though  an  adequate  picture  of  oppor- 
tunities can  be  had  only  by  statistically  reliable  portraits.  It  is 
the  individual  exception  rather  than  the  mass  facts,  however, 
which  is  seized  upon,  diffused,  and  generalized  by  the  mass 
media  as  a  model  criterion.  The  Horatio  Alger  stories  of  the  news- 
boy who  made  it'  by  reason  of  personal  virtues  may  seem 
merely  corny  to  victims  of  impersonal  depression,  yet  Mickey 
Mouse  and  Superman  are  followed  with  zeal  by  millions,  and 
there  is  a  clear  line  of  connection  between  Horatio  and  Mickey. 
Both  are  'little  men'  who  knife  their  way  to  the  top  by  paying 
strict  attention  to  No.  One— they  are  totem-like  individuals  who 
are  seen  in  the  miraculous  ritual  of  personal  success,  luckily  win- 
ning out  over  tremendous  obstacles.  Latter-day  heroes  of  success, 
however,  have  become  sharper  in  their  practices;  they  win  by 
tricks  and  often  by  stabs  in  the  back;  the  fights  they  wage  are 
dirtier  than  Horatio's. 

The  cowboy  and  the  detective,  standard  popular  culture  types, 
are  also  out  for  No.  One,  although  it  is  often  necessary  to  sanctify 
their  violent  methods  by  linking  their  motives  to  wider  ends.  But 
they  are  autonomous  men:  T  want  to  be  my  own  man,'  they  say, 
T  want  to  do  as  I  please.' 

The  easy  identification  with  private  success  finds  its  obverse 
side,  Gunnar  Myrdal  has  observed,  in  'the  remarkable  lack  of  a 
self-generating,  self-disciplined,  organized  people's  movement  in 
America.'  Not  collective  adventures,  nor  even  self-centered  fan- 
tasy, but  other  people's  private  success  is  often  at  the  center  of 
popular-media  attention.  This  generous  romanticism  of  success, 
resting  upon  an  easy  identification  with  those  who  succeed,  un- 
doubtedly lessens  the  psychological  pressure  of  economic  in- 
equality, which  otherwise  might  find  collective  outlet  in  political 
action  aimed  at  the  social  ideal  of  more  equality  of  wealth  and 
power. 

Only  a  few  of  the  major  characters  appearing  in  the  movies 
pursue  any  social  goals,  the  majority  are  engaged  by  ends  lying 
within  their  immediate  circles.  'The  interest  in  individuals,'  Leo 
Lowenthal  comments  more  generally,  'has  become  a  kind  of  mass 


338  WAYS  OF  POWER 

gossip.'  This  interest  and  the  way  it  is  satisfied  and  produced  are 
not,  however,  of  the  same  type  as  in  the  novels  of  the  eighteenth 
and  nineteenth  centuries.  The  subjects  chosen  for  popular  biog- 
raphies are  no  longer  models  in  terms  of  which  people  may  cul- 
tivate themselves  for  serious  individual  endeavor;  on  the  con- 
trary, they  are  idols  of  leisure  and  of  consumption,  the  concern 
being  with  their  private  lives,  valuable  friends,  hobbies,  style  of 
consumption— on  'the  psychological  gadgets'  with  which  they  are 
equipped  for  success.  In  their  presentation,  Lowenthal  concludes, 
'the  language  of  promotion  has  replaced  the  language  of  evalua- 
tion. Only  the  price  tag  is  missing.'  They  are  pseudo-individ- 
uals displayed  in  an  un-serious  sphere  of  life.  Their  'problems' 
arise  and  are  solved  individually,  by  means  of  their  own  vices  and 
virtues,  and  such  envy  as  they  evoke  is  focused  individually 
rather  than  in  terms  of  position  in  a  social  structure.  Not  indi- 
vidual envy  or  collective  resentment,  but  respect  and  awe  adhere 
to  the  glamour  of  individual  success. 

The  contents  of  the  mass  media  are  frequently  blamed  on  the 
political  ignorance  of  the  public.  It  is  true  that  only  21  per  cent 
of  the  public  has  'a  reasonably  accurate  idea  of  what  the  Bill  of 
Rights  is';  that  only  about  half  claim  to  know  what  a  lobbyist  is, 
and  that  many  of  these  cannot  recall  any  group  who  they  believe 
hire  lobbyists,  et  cetera.  Yet,  in  the  past,  the  highly  educated  have 
not  held  a  monopoly  on  political  alertness,  much  less  on  insur- 
gency. Moreover,  in  connection  with  the  political  world  of  the 
mass  media,  one  must  ask  why  is  it  that  people  are  so  ignorant, 
given  the  tremendous  volume  of  mass  communication  and  the 
increase  in  school  populations. 

The  educational  system  is  most  appropriately  seen  as  another 
mass  medium,  a  parochial  one  with  an  assured  public  of  younger 
age  groups.  In  their  most  liberal  endeavors,  the  political  content 
of  educational  institutions  is  often  unimaginative  and  serves  to 
lay  the  basis  for  the  successful  diversion  by  other  mass  media,  for 
the  trivialization,  fragmentation,  and  confusion  of  politics  as  a 
sphere  of  life.  With  their  ideological  dead-matter  and  intricately 
boring  citizenship  courses,  the  schools  cannot  compete  with  pop- 
ular culture  and  its  dazzling  idols.  And  when,  realizing  this,  they 
imitate  such  popular  culture  and  its  manner  of  presentation,  they 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  339 

too  merely  trivialize  their  subject,  without  making  it  much  less 
dull.  The  mass  educated  are  perhaps  the  most  politically  unin- 
terested, for  they  have  been  most  exposed  to  politics  in  civics- 
book  detail.  They  have  been  dulled  by  being  stuflFed  with  the 
conventional  idols  of  U.S.  politics.  Popular  culture  pervades  all 
classes  of  the  American  population,  but  perhaps,  if  only  because 
of  the  age  and  sex  diflferences,  it  grips  the  white-collar  girl  and 
the  black-coated  man  most  firmly.  They  are  at  the  center  of 
the  high-school  culture  at  which  the  mass  media  are  targeted, 
and  as  a  new  lower  middle  class,  they  form  an  eager  market  for 
the  gross  output. 

Yet,  why  do  mass-communication  agencies  contain  such  per- 
sistently non-political  or  false  political  content?  These  agencies 
are  of  course  owned  and  directed  by  a  small  group  of  people,  to 
whose  interest  it  is  to  present  individual  success  stories  and  other 
divertissement  rather  than  the  facts  of  collective  sucesses  and 
tragedies. 

But  the  fact  that  they  are  vested  interests  is  not  a  sufficient  ex- 
planation for  their  content.  Although  it  is  not  true  that  consum- 
ers' tastes  and  feelings  'direct'  their  output,  it  is  true  that  if 
enough  individuals  felt  able  to  boycott  such  programs,  the  movie 
makers,  the  advertisers,  and  the  personnel  departments  would  in 
some  way  seek  to  change  their  policies.  It  is  also  true  that  just 
as  many  isolated,  impoverished  people  do  not  have  a  conception 
of  adequate  housing  because  they  have  never  seen  it,  so  most 
movie-goers  and  radio  listeners  do  not  know  what  movies  and 
radio  could  be.  People  put  up  with  their  present  content  and 
like  it  because  they  are  not  aware  of  any  other  possibility;  they 
are  strongly  predisposed  to  see,  hear,  and  read  what  they  have 
been  trained  to  see,  hear,  and  read.  Yet  we  cannot  overlook  the 
social  bases  of  their  fascinated  receptivity. 

To  understand  the  continued  enthusiasm  for  present  media 
content,  we  must  look  beyond  the  psychology  of  apathetic  and 
uninformed  individuals,  and  the  vested  interests  of  the  agencies 
of  mass  communication.  The  media  do  create,  but  they  also  rein- 
force existing  tendencies,  cater  to  existing  want.  They  do  facili- 
tate and  focus  impulses  and  needs  there  before  them.  There  is 
a  close  interplay  between  media  and  public,  as  wants  are  incul- 


340  WAYS  OF  POWER 

cated  as  well  as  satisfied.  To  understand  the  bases  of  public  re- 
ceptivity as  well  as  the  contents  of  the  media,  we  must  go  beyond 
the  media  as  such,  and  examine  the  social-historical  setting  of  the 
U.S.  political  world  itself. 


4.  The  Social  Structure 

Explanations  of  a  theme  running  as  deep  as  political  aliena- 
tion must  be  made  in  terms  of  factors  that  extend  over  several 
generations.  For  it  arises  from  the  very  shaping  of  the  total  soci- 
ety, and  must  be  understood  in  terms  of  shifts  over  a  period 
of  time  which  it  helps  to  define  as  an  epoch. 

Many  of  the  psychological  trends  we  have  examined  in  con- 
nection with  the  transformation  of  the  middle  classes  implement 
indifference  as  a  prevailing  political  tone.  One  of  the  character- 
istic psychological  features  of  the  American  social  structure  today 
is  its  systematic  creation  and  maintenance  of  estrangement  from 
society  and  from  selfhood.  Only  against  this  broad  background 
can  we  hope  to  understand  the  specific  factors  that  have  focused 
these  trends  in  the  political  sphere. 

The  United  States  has  been  historically  characterized  by  a 
progressive  boom  of  real  income,  broken  only  once  on  a  wide 
scale— the  slump  of  the  'thirties— and  climbing  out  of  that  to  new 
heights  in  World  War  II.  At  first  a  frontier  expansion  and  later  a 
gigantic  industrial  elaboration  fed  this  trend.  As  for  wars,  the 
United  States  has  been  lucky  to  a  degree  that  is  unimaginable 
to  most  Europeans.  People  experiencing  such  a  histdry  of  increas- 
ing and  uninterrupted  material  contentment  are  not  likely  to 
develop  economic  resentments  that  would  turn  their  political 
institutions  into  means  of  ideological  conflict,  or  turn  their  minds 
into  political  forums. 

The  discrepancy  between  want  and  satisfaction  has  not  been 
so  wide  and  prolonged  for  any  group  as  to  affect  vitally  the  gen- 
eral tone  of  U.S.  life.  The  possibilities  for  climbing  have  been 
real  for  at  least  a  visible  minority,  and  political  demands  of  lower- 
income  and  occupational  ranks  have  thus  been  minimized  by 
economic  and  social  mobility.  As  small  entrepreneurship  began 
to  close,  the  white-collar  opportunities  opened  up,  which  even 
if  they  led  to  little  more  income  were  seen  as  above  mere  farm 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  341 

and  wage  work.  These  facts  have  made  for  an  acceptance  of 
stratification,  which  has  not  been  experienced  as  a  permanent 
or  oppressive  arrangement,  but  as  somehow  natural  and  fair.  If, 
as  Karl  Mannheim  has  noted,  the  expectations  of  an  inevitable 
class  struggle  merely  reflect  an  era  of  scarcity,  in  the  United 
States  such  ideas  have  not  taken  hold  by  virtue  of  the  long  era 
of  abundance. 

To  the  economic  facts  of  abundance,  the  rise  in  real  standards 
of  living,  and  the  upward  mobility,  there  was  added  a  relatively 
fluid  system  of  deference  in  a  rising  status  market.  Entering  the 
social  structure  at  or  near  the  bottom,  each  wave  of  the  35  million 
immigrants  who  poured  into  the  United  States  in  the  decades  be- 
fore 1920  took  on  for  a  while  at  least  the  difficult  jobs  and  the 
lowest  esteem,  thus  lifting  all  the  layers  above  themselves.  Those 
who  had  come  before  had  somebody  to  look  down  upon.  More- 
over, the  expectations  of  these  immigrants,  used  in  gauging  their 
satisfactions  and  discontents,  were  not  of  the  top  of  U.S.  society, 
but  rather  U.S.  society  versus  the  homeland;  their  standards  were 
inter-national  rather  than  inter-class.  And  their  homelands  were 
lower  in  standard  than  the  United  States:  for  millions  from  Eu- 
rope, America  remained  the  "great  land  of  promise,  no  matter 
how  low  they  were  in  the  United  States.  Besides,  given  the  vol- 
ume of  migration,  it  was  not  long  before  they,  too,  could  find 
newer  or  different  immigrants  to  look  down  upon  as  competitive 
menaces.  The  entire  force  of  nationalism  was  thus  behind  the 
idea  and  the  image  of  individual  ascent  and  against  notions  of 
class  equality.  The  Americanization  struggle  rather  than  the  class 
struggle  was  the  central  psychological  fact.  And  the  increased 
chance  for  education,  resting  upon  free  institutions  and  changes 
in  occupational  structure,  was  seen  as  an  American  cultural  lift, 
and  nourished  the  feelings  of  status  equality. 

Immigrants  added  to  a  geographically  immense  and  scattered 
country  the  further  heterogeneities  of  language,  culture,  religion. 
And  among  the  lower  ranks  such  differences  often  seemed  more 
important  than  their  common  class  and  occupational  levels.  This 
was  a  major  blow  at  psychological,  not  to  speak  of  political,  co- 
hesiveness  of  lower  classes.  To  it,  again,  must  be  added  the  ex- 
treme mobility  between  regions,  industries,  and  jobs  that  has 
been  so  extensive  in  America.  The  contrasts  in  occupational  en- 


342  WAYS  OF  POWER 

vironments  and  the  movement  from  one  to  another  diversify  and 
even  fragment  the  material  conditions,  and  hence  the  bases  of 
potential  solidarity.  Consciousness  of  position  and  political  will, 
observes  Edmund  Wilson,  have  been  more  likely  to  be  local  and 
sporadic  than  a  'social  split  that  runs  through  the  whole  people 
like  a  fissure.  .  / 

The  rapidity  of  change,  resting  on  technological  progress  in  a 
large  open  space,  has  made  for  extreme  diversity  and  mobility. 
The  people  have  not  been  'settled'  or  fixed  by  tradition,  and  so 
from  their  social  birth  they  have  been  alienated.  The  status  panic 
and  the  salesmanship  aegis  have  undoubtedly  furthered  this  un- 
settling process  and  further  distracted  the  individual  from  politi- 
cal demand  and  action  as  well  as  from  himself.  For  the  problem 
of  political  apathy,  viewed  sociologically,  is  part  of  the  larger 
problem  of  self-alienation  and  social  meaninglessness.  It  rests 
on  an  absence  of  firm  legitimations,  and  hence  of  accepted,  du- 
rable premiums  for  roles  played— and  yet  on  the  continued,  even 
the  compulsive,  enactment  of  these  roles. 

Many  of  the  historical  factors  and  trends  may  now  be  at  their 
historical  turning  point  or  even  end,  but  mentalities  do  not 
usually  keep  in  lock-step  with  history.  Moreover,  the  political 
order  itself  has  not  encouraged,  and  does  not  encourage,  a  politi- 
cal mentality  alert  to  new  realities. 

5.   U.S.  Politics 

Political  consciousness  is  most  immediately  determined  by  po- 
litically available  means  and  symbols.  It  is  the  political  sphere 
itself,  its  institutions  and  traditions,  its  rhetoric  and  practices,  its 
place  in  a  total  social  structure,  that  must,  after  all,  be  in  the 
forefront  of  an  explanation  of  political  indifference.  For  these  are 
what  political  consciousness  is  about.  In  fact,  all  other  factors  in 
the  mass  media  and  the  historic  social  structure  play  into  the 
political  sphere  and  there  interact  as  a  complex  of  causes. 

Economic  rather  than  political  institutions  have  undoubtedly 
been  of  greater  importance  to  life  endeavor  in  the  United  States. 
Politics,  in  fact,  has  been  widely  understood  as  a  means  for  gain- 
ing and  protecting  economic  ends  and  practices.  The  whole  lais- 


THE  POLITICS  OF  THE  REARGUARD  343 

sez-faire  tradition,  so  unevenly  applied  but  so  persistently  as- 
serted, has  been  the  anchor  and  expression  of  this  view.  How- 
ever inflated  by  rhetoric,  'political  fights'  have  been  less  over 
political  principles  than  over  economic  and  regional  interests. 
This  political  order  has  given  rise  to  the  patronage  machine, 
rather  than  the  ideological  party,  to  the  trade  union  rather  than 
the  'worker's  movement.'  Party  contests  have  been  contests  be- 
tween varied  types  and  sizes  of  property,  rather  than  between 
property  and  propertylessness,  and  unions  have  taken  their  place 
within  and  alongside  the  dominant  parties,  rather  than  in  oppo- 
sition to  them. 

In  short:  U.S.  politics  has  rarely  been  an  autonomous  force. 
It  has  been  anchored  in  the  economic  sphere,  its  men  using  po- 
litical means  to  gain  and  secure  limited  economic  ends.  So  in- 
terest in  it  has  seldom  been  an  interest  In  political  ends,  has  sel- 
dom involved  more  than  immediate  material  profits  and  losses. 

If  greater  American  statesmen  on  the  national  level,  as  Mat- 
thew Josephson  has  asserted,  have  been  concerned  to  adjust 
larger  business  interests  with  the  whole  community,  lesser  poli- 
ticians on  the  local  levels  have  often  been  concerned  to  realize 
smaller  but  more  directly  lucrative  business  ends.  And  some- 
times this  local  bent  has  manifested  itself  on  higher  levels.  Na- 
tional scandals  about  the  private  morality  of  public  men  have 
not  done  much  to  heighten  the  level  of  public  sensibility  or 
deepen  the  image  of  political  life  to  make  it  central,  urgent,  and 
worth  while. 

Locally,  as  Robert  and  Helen  Lynd  have  shown,  t